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qalmakka • last Wednesday at 8:17 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

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


Replies

geokon • yesterday at 3:01 AM

Is there evidence that LLMs generate better code in more popular languages? I get the sense the "experience" translates between languages and it can reason in any language just fine. I write Clojure code using a rather esoteric framework (Pathom3). There is probably very little similar code out there (it's definitely a tiny fraction of the training dataset) but it seems to do just fine

Not saying you're wrong, just curious if there are numbers backing this up.

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Mond_ • last Wednesday at 10:14 PM

Cpp2 has been dead for a while afaik, while Carbon is still going.

I don't think Carbon is dead, it just all depends on how easy it actually is to rewrite "all of C++" in Rust. (The jury is still out on this one, but it's not looking good.)

fg137 • yesterday at 11:49 AM

None of these solutions has a chance. That should be clear from the beginning. C++ community is so slow at updating codebase to latest C++ standard, let alone a different language. The last thing the C++ community will do is to migrate to an incompatible language that only looks/reads like C++. That did not happen in the past 30 years and will not happen now.