He didn't staff a team of compiler engineers to do it. Doesn't matter how good it is when mature languages that reach the mainstream all have compilers funded by 10 people at a tech giant and cppfront is just Sutter screwing around in his free time.
Google threw the weight of their top C++ engineers behind Carbon. It's happening. That's really what matters in the world of programming languages. Not how good it is.
Just watch what happens to Google and their ad revenues in this downturn, by the way. I knew people that were hyping Fuschia, and then Google cut deepest from that on their first round of layoffs. It wouldn't be a shock to me if they yank out the carpet from this Carbon thing one day, or have it limp along like Dart.
In summary, Google can do what it wants, but I'll just keep using C++ no matter what it does. I spend all my time in and on HaikuOS now, so for me C++ here here to stay :)
It's good to see that you're having fun with Haiku. I actually enjoyed programming for Haiku a couple of years back on my Haiku only project (Medo), these days I'm 100% exhausted with my day job (and my previous company went into liquidation and I changed jobs / continents), and it's hard to make the time for passion projects.
Best of luck with your project, I look forward to seeing it released one day.
Thanks! I'm working on a port of Solvespace to Haiku. My goal is ultimately to give it a native UI and some new features, but I'm still early in the process. The latest thing I got working was some pixels in the screen from a replacement 2D renderer that uses AGG instead of Cairo. I post screenshots to Twitter as I go (@realtaraharris).
Why do you think Dart is limping along? It has a very large team working on it and a very popular framework built on top. I think it may even be more popular and get more investment than golang. Google would probably be happy if Carbon is as successful as dart.
Also being dismissive of Fuchsia being a dead end despite contributing to Haiku seems a bit ironic.
There’s “meets my needs today, which include a belief in the ling term viability and talent pipeline”, and there’s “the small project I wrote can keep running on obsolete hardware forever”
It's on a device that is unimportant to Google, and it's just an implementation detail. Fuschia could disappear entirely in one software update, or with cancellation of the Nest product line.
I like the ideas Fuschia is trying to implement, but unfortunately it still looks like a small experiment with an uncertain future.
Even if it dies tomorrow, it already achieved more than many wannabe OS out there, so there is that.
And who knows, just like it happened with Singularity and Midori having an impact on .NET design since WinRT, some Fuchsia ideas can be brought into Android in that case.
The thing is, Sutter's approach is much more sensible when looking at real world adaptation. You can start using the cppfront transpiler, and importantly, if it doesn't work out, you can just use the C++ code generated by cppfront (which Herb Sutter said is meant to be idiomatic and human-readable).
From a risk perspective, a developer will have a much easier time convincing a manager to try using cppfront instead of Carbon.
Maybe once Carbon reaches a stable 1.0 release and has seen some success in production (~2026 maybe?), that point won't be as important, but especially in the beginning it seems to me a deciding factor.
Google threw the weight of their top C++ engineers behind Carbon. It's happening. That's really what matters in the world of programming languages. Not how good it is.