I think I don't know a single gamdev who's fond of "modern C++" or even the C++ stdlib in general (and stdlib changes is what most of "modern C++" is about). the last good version was basically C++11. In general the C++ committee seems to be largely disconnected from reality (especially now that Google seems to be doing its own C++ successor, but even before, Google's requirements are entirely different from gamedev requirements).
C++17/20 are light-years beyond C++11 in terms of ergonomics and usability. Metaprogramming in C++11 is unrecognizable from C++20 things have improved so much. I hated C++ before C++11 but now C++11 feels quite legacy compared to even C++17. The ability to write almost anything, like a logging library, without C macros is a huge improvement for maintainability and robustness.
Most of the features in modern C++ are designed to enable writing really flexible and highly optimized libraries. C++ rarely writes those libraries for you.
Metaprogramming is required to get typesafe easy to use code. The problem of most template code is that the implementation gets horrendously complicated but for the user it can create A LOT of comfort. At work for example, I wrote a function that calls an rpc-method and it has a few neat features like:
An rpc call with a result looks like this:
call(<methodinfo>, <param>, [](Result r) {});
vs one which returns void:
call(<methodinfo>, <param>, []() {});
It's neat that the callback reflects that, but this wouldn't be possible without some compiletime magic.
Hi, I'm a game developer and I'm fond of "modern C++" and the stdlib.
Sure, I would like some priorities to be different (i.e. we should have had static reflection a while ago), but it's still moving in the right direction.
Particularly the idea that "the last good version was basically C++11" is exactly what I would expect to hear from someone who reads a few edgy articles on the internet but has no actual in-depth experience working with the language. C++14 and 17 are, for a large part, plain ergonomic upgrades over C++11, with lots of minor but impactful additions and improvements all over. I can't even think of anything in those two versions that would be sufficiently controversial to make anyone prefer C++11 over them, or call it the "last good version".
C++20 is obviously a larger step, and does include a few more controversial changes, but those are completely optional (and I don't expect many of them to be widely adopted in gamedev for a decade at least, even though for some I wish it went more quickly).
Then let's hear some counter examples please. As far as I'm aware the last important language change since C++11 was designated init in C++20, and that's been butchered so much compared to C99 that it is essentially useless for real world code.
There a whole bunch of features and fixes that each new version of the standard proclaimed, which severely affected usability, expressibility and convenience of the language. Describing many of them could easily take an hour. I'm sorry, I can only highlight a few of my particular favourites that I regularly use and let you study the rest changes.
- inline variables finally fixes the biggest pain of developing header-only libraries
- useful noexcept fix
- if constexpr + constexpr lambdas
- structured bindings
- guaranteed copy elision
- fold expressions
I'm at automotive where due to safety requirements we just barely started to work with C++17, so I don't have much practical experience of the standards past it, though I'm aware there are great updates too.
Overall - C++11 is as horrible compared to C++17, as C++98 and roughly 03 were compared to ground breaking back then C++11. Personally, when I skim though job vacancies and see they are stuck at C++11, I pass it. Even C++14 makes me very sceptical, even though I used it really a lot. All due to new nice improvements of C++17.
Ok, I'll give you fold expressions and structured bindings as actually important language updates. The rest are mostly just tweaks that plug feature gaps which shouldn't have existed in the first place when the basic feature was introduced in C++11 or earlier.
IMHO by far most things which the C++ committee accepts as stdlib updates should actually be language changes (like for instance std::tuple, std::variant or std::range). Because as stdlib features those things make C++ code more and more unreadable compared to "proper" syntax sugar (Rust suffers from the exact same problem btw).
He missed concepts and modules which are also c++20 features, modules are just not properly supported (yet). Concepts are a massive QoL feature and modules might help with compile times.
> IMHO by far most things which the C++ committee accepts as stdlib updates should actually be language changes
From my experience thats not how the c++ committee works. They generally decompose requested features into the smallest building blocks and just include those in the language and let the rest be handled by the stdlib.
The thing that makes C++ unreadable in my opinion is template code and the fact that the namespace system sucks and just leads to unreadably long names (std::chrono::duration_cast<std::chrono::milliseconds>(.....)).
Oh I followed the C++ standardization process quite closely for about 15 years up until around C++14 and still follow it from the sidelines (having mostly switched back to C since then), and I'm fully aware of the fact that C++ has designed itself into a complexity corner where it is very hard to add new language features (after all, C++ has added more new problems that had then to be fixed in later standards than it inherited from C in the first place).
I still think the C++ committee should mainly be concerned about the language instead of shoehorning stuff into the stdlib, even if fixing the language is the harder problem.
And I can't be alone in this frustration, otherwise Carbon, Circle and Herb Sutter's cppfront wouldn't have happened.
It's even worse than that, because even if a new proposal had no concerns from a language & library point of view, it can still be crippled by vendor concerns because of short-sighted, entirely unforced errors the vendors made, often decades prior.
It's part of why I don't believe the C++-compatible C++-successor languages will deliver on their promises nearly as well as they think. They only solve half of the problem, which is that their translation units don't have to accommodate legacy C++ syntax.
They still have to reproduce existing C++ semantics and ABIs, their types still have to satisfy C++ SFINAE and Concepts, etc. so they're bringing all of the semantic baggage no matter what new syntax they dress it in.
And anywhere they end up introducing new abstractions to try to enforce safety, those will be incompatible with C++ enough to require hand-crafted wrappers, just like we already do with Rust, only Rust is much further along its own maturity and adoption curve than those languages are.
A practical example on C++14 & its constexpr+variable templates fixes, and why this was important: a while ago I wrote a wrapper over a compile-time fixed size array that imposed a variable compile-time fixed tensor layout on it. Basically, it turned a linear array into any matrix, or 3D or 4D or whatever -D is needed tensor and allowed to efficiently work with them in compile time already. There was obviously constexpr constuction + constexpr indexing + some constexpr tensor operations. In particular there was a constexpr trace operation for square matrices (a sum of the elements on the main diagonal, if I'm not mistaken). I decided to showcase the power of constexpr to some juniors in the team. For some reason, I thought that since the indexing operation is constexpr, then computing the matrix trace would require a compiler to just take elements of the matrix at precomputed at compile time addresses, which will be seen in the disassembly as memory loads from fixed offsets (without computing these offsets in runtime, since matrix layout is fixed in a compile time and index computation is constexpr operation). So I quickly wrote an example, compiled it with asm output, and looked at it... It was a facepalm moment - I forgot that trace() was also constexpr, so instead of doing any runtime computations at all, the code just had already computed trace value as a constant in a register. How is it not cool? Awesome!
Such things are extremely valueable as they allow to write much more expressive and easy to understand and maintain code for entities known in a compile time.
