Something Cool
If I have kept count accurately, the week beginning April 9, 2001 was the 14th instance of Chuck.attend(SD), where SD is a manifest constant for Miller-Freeman-turned-CMP-Media’s “Software Development Conference.” During those 7+ years, I have enjoyed saxophone solos by Philipe Kahn, founder of Borland, International (with free copies of Delphi to boot!); schmoozing with the best of the best of our industry at speaker parties and dinners; receiving my share of promotional t-shirts, pens, hats, card holders and other snazzy vendor paraphernalia; and of course, developing and delivering talks on topics of interest to me and others.
By far one of the coolest parts of SD has been attending Scott Meyers’ recurring theme talks entitled “Something Cool in C++,” wherein he expounds on this or that topic that tickles his fancy. If you’ve ever heard Scott speak, you know that if he is excited about something, you will be too, because the contagion is simply irresistible. April 2001 was no exception when Scott cited Andrei Alexendrescu’s work in his search for the Perfect Singleton. While the details of the topic belong in a separate article, let me say that I remain encouraged by the perpetual flow of fresh and useful ideas found in the C++ community. Andrei’s work is taking generic programming to a higher level and bears witness to the sound design of C++’s template facility. Of course, we’re still waiting for compilers to fully implement the 1998 C++ Standard, so you may not even be able to try some of his examples. Perhaps you have found that things have been relatively quiet on the C++ front for a couple of years while compiler writers catch up.
But for Bjarne Stroustrup, the wait is over. He made in quite clear at SD that it is time to start talking about C++0x. With his prodding and direction, the standards committee is now on task to make C++ an even better language for systems programming and library building, as well as a safer language for novices. You can bet that there will be some kind of support for multithreading and for meta-programming through extended type information. On the easier-to-get-things-right front, he also suggested implicit range checking for strings and vectors, and automatic synthesis of virtual destructors.
So your favorite language is alive and well and getting better all the time. That’s something cool.
Chuck Allison
Publisher’s Note: It’s hail and farewell time again at C/C++ Users Journal. The June issue saw the departure of our outstanding editor-in-chief, Marc Briand, under whose stewardship CUJ flourished for seven years. We thank Marc for his commitment to giving CUJ’s readers the best in programming practice and information, and we wish him well as he returns to the engineering life. At the same time, we welcome aboard, as Senior Editor, CUJ’s long-time contributing editor and all-around resource, Chuck Allison. Many of you will recall Chuck’s “Code Capsules” column (the genesis of his book, C & C++ Code Capsules: A Guide for Practitioners) from earlier years; more recently you’ll have seen his “import java.*”. Chuck brings to CUJ extensive experience in programming, teaching, writing, and lecturing – we look forward to working with him and believe all our readers will benefit from his new role with CUJ. —mm
Senior Editor