Google Launches Carbon, an Experimental Replacement for C++

[Rui Carlos]

Citação

Frustrated by the slow evolution of the C++, Google engineers have launched a new “experimental” open source programming language, called Carbon, as a possible successor to the venerable but aging C++.

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Long the language of choice for building performance-critical applications, C++ is plagued with a number of issues that hamper modern developers, Carruth explained on a GitHub page.  It has accumulated decades of technical debt, bringing with it many of the outdated practices that were part of the language’s predecessor, C. The keepers of C++ prioritize backward compatibility, in order to continue to support widely-used projects such as Linux and its package management ecosystem, Carruth charged.

In: https://thenewstack.io/google-launches-carbon-an-experimental-replacement-for-c/

Citação

Why build Carbon?

C++ remains the dominant programming language for performance-critical software, with massive and growing codebases and investments. However, it is struggling to improve and meet developers' needs, as outlined above, in no small part due to accumulating decades of technical debt. Incrementally improving C++ is extremely difficult, both due to the technical debt itself and challenges with its evolution process. The best way to address these problems is to avoid inheriting the legacy of C or C++ directly, and instead start with solid language foundations like modern generics system, modular code organization, and consistent, simple syntax.

Existing modern languages already provide an excellent developer experience: Go, Swift, Kotlin, Rust, and many more. Developers that can use one of these existing languages should. Unfortunately, the designs of these languages present significant barriers to adoption and migration from C++. These barriers range from changes in the idiomatic design of software to performance overhead.

Carbon is fundamentally a successor language approach, rather than an attempt to incrementally evolve C++. It is designed around interoperability with C++ as well as large-scale adoption and migration for existing C++ codebases and developers. A successor language for C++ requires:

• Performance matching C++, an essential property for our developers.
• Seamless, bidirectional interoperability with C++, such that a library anywhere in an existing C++ stack can adopt Carbon without porting the rest.
• A gentle learning curve with reasonable familiarity for C++ developers.
• Comparable expressivity and support for existing software's design and architecture.
• Scalable migration, with some level of source-to-source translation for idiomatic C++ code.

In: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang#why-build-carbon