alt Hacker NewsI wonder if this means Carbon is DOA.
I was excited to see what it would be. But I don't think I can argue that it makes as much sense anymore.
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Carbon's own docs say:
> 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.
So the reason for Carbon to exist is gone. C++ code can be migrated straight to Rust without Carbon's stopgap.
It was never built with an open source community in mind. It was always DOA in a world where Rust existed.
Version 0.0.0.0 after 4 years. Their goal of "full interop with C++ while being a completely new language without any of the flaws of C++" is plain absurd.
It's DOA because Google doesn't have any idea of what Carbon should be, and to be completely honest, at least 80% of what they currently use C++ for should be rewritten Go, you know, that language developed specifically because of the issues with C++ by teams within Google.
Carbon was clearly DOA the moment it was announced, IMHO. It looked cool but it served none but Google, and now with LLMs you have a massive incentive not to use a niche or new language due to how better LLMs get the bigger the corpus is
The only somewhat realistic proposal in this space is Herb Sutter's cpp2, which is arguably a massive improvement and I'm puzzled why nobody in the standard thought to give it a spin, there's just to much cruft they'll never be able to get rid of unless they make an alternate yet backward compatible syntax with C++ that changes the defaults from "random 80s nonsense" to something better