Should C++ be deprecated?
Should C++ be deprecated?
Posted Sep 17, 2025 10:45 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769)In reply to: Should C++ be deprecated? by farnz
Parent article: Comparing Rust to Carbon
Anybody can say that, and you're always free to ignore them. It only really matters when the person saying it is a trusted expert and/or has some power over you. (If they're an expert, you can assume they've got good reasons for saying you shouldn't use that feature, and you don't need to waste time working through the whole rationale yourself to come to the same conclusion. If they have power, e.g. they can influence whether new compilers are going to be compatible with your old software, then their rationale doesn't matter and you should consider following their advice now to avoid some compatibility pain in the future. But you can still choose to ignore them, and accept the consequences.)
Standards bodies have both expertise and power, so it matters when they say something is deprecated. But things can also be deprecated by community consensus, or by a company's policies, or by an individual developer, etc. Any of them can say "we think you shouldn't use C++, and we're going to stop writing specifications/tools/documentation/etc for C++ and stop using C++ libraries in our applications and stop contributing to C++ projects", and it doesn't matter that not everyone will agree - it all contributes to a gradual shift away from C++.
Posted Sep 17, 2025 12:41 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (2 responses)
In the long run, things like the EU's Cyber Resilience Act are going to push in this sort of general direction, by stopping commercial entities from treating security as an externality, but that's a very slow process.
Posted Sep 17, 2025 16:26 UTC (Wed)
by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
[Link] (1 responses)
Not necessarily. If the government entity responsible for the standards organization that certifies your certified-and-thus-expensive access control system, esp. its compliance with regulations and whatnot, says "C++ is deprecated", this directly translates to requiring extra justification/scrutinity when you renew said certification, the number of C++ experts who say that C++ is fine nonwithstanding.
Posted Sep 17, 2025 16:38 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
Ferrocene is an example of a qualified compiler; you'd use the Project Documents to determine whether you're meeting the qualification requirements for this compiler; in this case, there's a set of constraints in the Safety Manual which tell you what the caveats are for Ferrocene.
You might see the qualification caveats for your C++ compiler get gradually more stringent, which might have the effect of making you deprecate C++ (especially if they start to conflict with "custom and practice" in the wider C++ community), but that's the most certification is likely to lead to.
But to deprecate C++ globally means getting most of the trusted experts worldwide to say that C++ is deprecated; I don't see a path through to that in the near future, because the people we'd need to deprecate C++ in any significant fashion are currently backing C++.
Should C++ be deprecated?
Should C++ be deprecated?
Most of the standards I'm aware of don't care about language in use - they won't ever deprecate C++ as a result. Instead, they have the notion of a "qualified compiler", and if your compiler is qualified and you meet the caveats of that qualification, then you can do your certification at source level, instead of binary level.
Should C++ be deprecated?