[Interest] The willy-nilly deletion of convenience, methods

Benjamen Meyer bm_witness at yahoo.com
Tue Mar 23 15:36:56 CET 2021


On 3/23/21 10:09 AM, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
> On 23/03/2021 09.16, Michael Jackson wrote:
>> Having read this entire conversation I find it interesting that we as
>> developers are complaining about features being deprecated and
>> removed in Qt but yet where is the anger when C++ spec removes
>> features?
> Oh, it's there.
> 
> However, C++ is *far* more conservative than Qt about what it removes,
> and most of the removals are genuinely unuseful. (Seriously,
> *trigraphs*? Are *you* using trigraphs? Or auto_ptr?)
> 
> If you're seriously going to advance this argument, you need to point
> out one or more *specific* changes that you believe are harmful. Even
> then, chances are your compiler will continue to support that stuff for
> another 10 years.

The change of `auto` from a scope function to a variable type is
certainly harmful, especially since there was no version in between
where it wasn't defined at all; it was just changed. Granted the
argument was "no one uses it", but if you're porting an old application
that _did_ use it you'll get all kinds of junk quickly. And yes, there
was a type when I was learning about the various scoping aspects of
variables that I did learn about and use it; and I'm sure there is
legacy code out there that uses it.

Honestly, there hasn't been much added to C++ since C++98 that was
useful. std::string is one exception, as is standardizing on using Boost
- but you don't need to make Boost part of the C++ standards to achieve
that.

> Also, C++ isn't a dictatorship the way Qt is. Anyone can object to any
> change, not just on a mailing list, but in person. Anyone can, in theory
> (in practice, depending on where you live, there may be a non-trivial
> membership fee required) *vote* against a change. We, as the committee,
> generally try to be considerate of the community when making changes,
> and there is quite a lot of emphasis on not breaking existing code, even
> as far back as C++98.
> 

How many C++ devs are on those? Likely only those whose companies are
paying them to be, and a few that got there via academics (I've
personally known and worked with one person; outside of the folks I've
seen here on the Qt lists.)

In all honesty, it comes down to those who are paying to vote - which is
certainly not the vast majority of C++ devs.

-- 
Ben Meyer
Software Engineer
(703)901-2797
bm_witness at yahoo.com


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