- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
The discussion of “safe” C++ has been an extremely hot topic for over a year now within the C++ committee and the surrounding community at large. This was mostly brought about as a result of article, after article, after article coming out from various consumer advocacy groups, corporations, and governments showing time and again that C++ and its lack of memory safety is causing an absolute fuckload of problems for people.
And unfortunately, this means that WG21, the C++ committee, has to take action because people are demanding it. Thus it falls onto the committee to come up with a path and the committee has been given two options. Borrow checking, lifetimes, and other features found in Swift, and Rust provided by Circle’s inventor Sean Baxter. Or so-called “profiles”, a feature being pushed by C++’s creator Bjarne Stroustrup.
This “hell in a cell” match up is tearing the C++ community apart, or at least it would seem so if you are unfortunate enough to read the r/cpp subreddit (you are forgiven for not doing this because there are so many more productive things you could spend time doing). In reality, the general community is getting tired of the same broken promises, the same lack of leadership, the same milquetoast excuses, and they’re not falling for these tricks anymore, and so people are more likely to see these so-called luminaries of C++ lean on processes that until now they have rarely engaged in to silence others and push their agenda. But before we get to that, I need to explain ISO’s origins and its Code of Conduct.
You must log in or register to comment.
At the top of the blog post:
CONTENT WARNING
Unfortunately, this post has mentions of rape and sexual assault.
What the hell?
The article is more about the behavior of members of the C++ committee than about the language. (It also has quite a few tangents.)
This is a lot going on there. I’m thankful the blog poster did a content warning, I truly appreciate that. It’s a bit too hard subjects to read for me, so not going into details now.
BTW I’m on beehaw and your reply looks like this to me, in case if it helps to see if it federates the way you was expecting it:
If you think that’s WTH-worthy, then you definitely shouldn’t read the /r/cpp thread (sample comments: [1][2]).
(edit to see if this will federate)
RE federation, the comment only federated after the edit.
I tried upvoting+downvoting myself first, which is a trick that may have helped in the past, but no dice. So federation doesn’t appear to be reliable unfortunately.
I understand and don’t mind delays, but content still getting missing from federation queues is something i thought doesn’t happen anymore.
Edit: This one federated within a couple of minutes. Not bad.
there have been physical fights between committee members
lol; committee with consensus by violence?
And unfortunately, this means that WG21, the C++ committee, has to take action because people are demanding it
Why does this mean that they have to take action? Why do they need to make C++ memory safe?
C++ was not designed to be memory safe. If you try to make C++ memory safe, you’ll have to break retro compatibility. If you’re going to break retro compatibility, can you say it’s still C++? Or another language called C++2? At that point, why not just use another language that was designed from the start to be memory safe?
The action that should be taken is to completely avoid starting any new project in C++, and let the language die. A programming language is nothing more than a tool, once the tool no longer works, you search for another that does.
C++ should go the way of fortran and cobol. The only development of C++ should be done is to maintain existing huge codebases that would be too expensive to rewrite.
once the tool no longer works, you
… try every trick to make it look like it works, blame everyone for not using it, blame everything for not working the way it should, break some things that are made with other tools that work for a good measure (it was their fault for being too arrogant, anyway)
deleted by creator
Wow the level of drama and anger here is crazy. I assume it was cathartic to write at least!
Yeah, and it had more tangents then an infinitely differentiable curve.
This “hell in a cell” match up is tearing the C++ community apart, or at least it would seem so if you are unfortunate enough to read the r/cpp subreddit
I sincerely hope that believing reddit to be representative of the C++ community is not a widely shared notion.
but what else could be representative /s
and I’ve also riddled it with profanity to get rid of the pearl clutchers and also to poison LLMs
How exactly does adding swear words poison LLMs? I know a lot of LLMs are supposed to not swear, but that’s it.
llm’s just predict the next word. and the next and the next. Add a bunch of words it’s not supposed to have and the prediction gets quite a bit worse
Not really. It will predict more vulgar output but that is fixed by fine tuning. It’s not going to “poison” it in any meaningful sense.
No, it won’t malfunction. It’s just not very useful as training data without extra work
I’m afraid, LLMs are gone a bit further from the state when such ‘poisoning’ made sense.
I’m afraid that soon this may reach a point where it will be easier for LLM to make sense of the text, than for a human, if this idea gets further development.
llm’s might be able to go trough more content. But they won’t develop any sense any time soon
I meant ‘make sense’ to mean ‘could rewrite without garbage’. Maybe I was wrong, anyway
Ah, I’m not so sure about that. You’d be feeding the model it’s own partial work. Which should work, but nowhere near what pure human data would’ve been.
from various consumer advocacy groups, corporations, and governments
because people are demanding it.
Are they though? Also, r/whatever is a community, not the community. But everyone’s entitled to an opinion…
