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Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Stroustrup's list of objections sounds quite sensible to me: https://www.stroustrup.com/Contracts_fundamental_flaws.pdf

> The P2900 contracts failings:

> Unimplemented — GCC 16.1 (released 2026-04-30) ships it only as experimental

It will always be experimental before it is standardized, because before standardization the specification could change which means if it was not experimental, GCC had to maintain a standard-incompatible implementation.

Expecting a non-experimental implementation as a requirement for standardization is an impossible goalpost.

Agreed. I've not liked the contract setup for various reasons. It seems like the proponents of it are mostly there because it scratches an itch in PL PhD studies rather than being an actually useful feature.

I remain unconvinced as why this is a necessary feature over the already existing `assert` statements.

At the end, it became very clear that some of the prose came from LLMs. It's a very short survey of other objections. I wonder why he/they reached for an LLM instead of writing it manually.

Because in circles like HN everyone is proudly telling how they burn Claude tokens?

You think Stroustrup's decision making is primarily decided by what's currently hype on HN?

Nice way to twist my words, I was replying to the usual paradox in HN to hype about LLMs to code, and complain about the same LLMs to write docs.

I don't think I was twisting your words?

    > > I wonder why he/they reached for an LLM instead of writing it manually.
    > Because in circles like HN everyone is proudly
    > telling how they burn Claude tokens?

Or was the "because" not meant to indicate that you're answering the question, were you instead using it as a different rhetorical device? I suppose that could make sense. I think it could've been written a bit more clearly. I really wasn't trying to twist your words.

The paper sounds very, very much like Claude

> Not tried in major application domains — no shipping production codebase uses pre/post/contract_assert.

This line is where I realised it's Claude. Also note the emdashes.

Did people not read articles and books with em-dashes before LLMs? Why are we pretending nobody used them before? It's one of the first things people learn to typeset properly when learning LaTeX for the first time, not to mention so many books we grew up reading used them regularly.

I loved em-dashes --- I still do (as you can see, I'm partial to AP style ;)) But most people never understood the difference between hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes in the first place. Or that The King's English uses en-dashes where US English uses em-dashes. Merriam-Webster has a short and amusing -- to me -- article on this topic [1]. So all kinds of "dashes" are rolled into the "em-dash is an AI tell" hysteria.

That LLMs use them all the time is also a good indicator that there are alot to be found in the training material.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/how-to-use-and-under...

I routinely use em dashes. They are easy to type on Mac and Linux. Only Windows makes it a hurdle.

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