C++ Is Getting More Like Java Every Day

Lawrence Crowl gave an interesting talk at Google last week. It would seem that the next revision of the C++ standard is getting:

A new memory model,
Garbage collection,
Concepts (which are more-or-less type checking for templates. This roughly boils down to "generics")
Unicode support,
A regular expression library,
A for-each loop!

This is all starting to sound terribly familiar. I'm starting to like that language! Now all they have to do is get rid of multiple inheritance and their awful operator overloading semantics, and replace the STL, and I'll be sold.

The new standard will be C++0x. They haven't decided whether x is 8 or 9 yet. Knowing the standards process, I imagine it will be 9. I hope they keep x to single digits...

Anyway, in addition to all of this, it is getting move semantics for rvalues, lots of new syntax for initializers, and buckets of other things. Check out the talk for more.

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