Re: "Trip report: June 2025 ISO C++ standards meeting (Sofia,

On Wed, 25 Jun 2025 21:03:15 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wibbled:

On 25/06/2025 17:52, Muttley@dastardlyhq.com wrote:

IIRC correctly the java version is runtime reflection, the C++ version will
be compile time which is utterly pointless. If the compiler knows whats there

>

at compile them then so do you and you can write your code accordingly.
 

>
I am not sure what your biggest problem is - your depressive pessimism,
your ignorance, or your lack of imagination.  Have you ever actually

Can always rely on you to come out with an insult in the first few lines.
You must be a very insecure individual.

written code in C++?  It is /full/ of features where the compiler knows
something, and the programmer does not want to type it out manually
every time - "auto", templates, constexpr functions, type traits, etc.

Templates save a huge amount of cut and paste and often manual code mods.
constexpr's usualy return a single value that could easily be precomputed
either beforehand or just put in a macro. Meanwhile "if constexpr" seems to
just be a reinvention of the wheel in that the exact same can be achieved
with template specialisation. You won't be surprised to hear I've never yet
used a constexpr in any code I've written.

Even C idioms like "p = malloc(100 * sizeof *p);" are asking the
compiler to fill in something the programmer already knows.

The size of p could vary on different architectures so no, thats not always
the case.

You complain about C++ being complex - features like reflection make it
/less/ complex in several ways.  It makes it far easier to make your own

Oh please, we hear this cretinous refrain every time they chuck in yet more
semantics. I've yet to notice C++ becoming less complicated. The last genuinely
useful features was shared_mutex which frankly should have been in from the
start of adding threads. 3 level locking is a basic part of threading
functionality.

 There are all sorts of use-cases where reflection will let you write
simpler C++ code, or write things only once but have the information
available in different forms (enum->string and string->enum being the
typical example).

Feel free to provide some before and after examples of code simplified
using it.