Bjarne Stroustrup has achieved some fame as the father of the C ++ programming language; even today he is still involved in the standardization of C ++. In an interview with heise Developer, Stroustrup explains what will be of long-term importance for developers in C ++ 20 and how the others will Future programming language looks like.

heise Developer: Which new features from C ++ 20 will have the most importance for C ++ in the long term and why?

Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup: Modules, Concepts and Coroutines.

Modules will finally bring us better code hygiene (less macro pollution), easier compilation of code from libraries and much faster compilation. I look forward to mature module implementations that can be easily integrated into the general program development environment. This will take time.

Please be aware that C ++ 20 will not be official for a few more months until the ISO secretariat in Geneva has completed its non-technical review . Therefore, we should be satisfied with early implementations and not be too impatient with imperfections. We also first have to learn to use modules well. Much of what we do is riddled with bad habits from nearly years of #include and #define. Just because we are familiar with the preprocessor does not necessarily mean that it is easy to use.

Concepts will probably come very close to generic programming of what ordinary programming is today. They will make our code much more flexible, reusable and efficient. When I designed the templates, I wanted three things:

Expressiveness Generality , whereby “expressiveness” stands for the ability to express an idea concisely and directly. “Generality” is the ability to do that for a wide range of topics, rather than just having a limited set of choices as provided by the designer. Unmatched efficiency. Type Checking as ” precise specification “. (Picture: Bjarne Stroustrup)

Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup is the father of C ++. The mathematician, who holds a doctorate in computer science, is a technical fellow in the technology department at Morgan Stanley in New York City and a visiting professor at Columbia University. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and recipient of the Charles Stark Draper Prize. For more than 30 years he has been a member of the ISO standards committee. His goal is to make C ++ a stable, contemporary basis for software development “for real life”. I managed the first two, but not the third point. That was enough to make generic programming and metaprogramming with templates a resounding success, but it strained the possibilities of the programming language and its implementation beyond an acceptable level. The fact that sane people were willing to endure these imperfections in order to gain the benefit makes a strong case for the basic ideas of C ++ being sane.