In early September I had a very enjoyable technical chat with Steve Klabnik of Rust fame and interviewer Kevin Ball of Software Engineering Daily, and the podcast is now available.
Update: I asked them to please change the “Rust vs C++” title to “Rust and C++” and they kindly did so. Thanks!
In software engineering, C++ is often used in areas where low-level system access and high-performance are critical, such as operating systems, game engines, and embedded systems. Its long-standing presence and compatibility with legacy code make it a go-to language for maintaining and extending older projects. Rust, while newer, is gaining traction in roles that demand safety and concurrency, particularly in systems programming.
We wanted to explore these two languages side-by-side, so we invited Herb Sutter and Steve Klabnik to join host Kevin Ball on the show. Herb works at Microsoft and chairs the ISO C++ standards committee. Steve works at Oxide Computer Company, is an alumnus of the Rust Core Team, and is the primary author of The Rust Programming Language book.
We hope you enjoy this deep dive into Rust and C++ on Software Engineering Daily.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Boy, Jens Weller turns these things around quickly! Thanks again, Jens, for having me on your Meeting C++ Live show.
I’ve put a list of the questions, with timestamped links, below…
All the questions and answers, with links
00:19 What are you up to with C++ currently / what keeps you excited?
04:04 Sean Baxter has finally written up a proposal to bring borrow checking to C++, to improve safety. What are your views on his proposal and what approach is Cpp2 planning?
08:48 Is there a long-term vision for C++? How can C++ maintain its relevance in the next 20 years?
13:14 What is your favorite C++ editor/IDE when not using Microsoft Visual Studio?
17:43 Why is MSVC 2022 falling behind Clang and GCC on C++23 and C++26 features?
21:21 What is the roadmap for Cpp2? Whether it will be fit for production use?
26:30 Should the stdlib be split in two parts. One with slow changes and one with fast changes. E.g., ranges were introduced in C++20 but finished in C++23. I am still missing some features.
29:34 Are there plans to address ABIs with interfaces or other features in C++?
36:18 What is your answer to the growing complexity of C++ to be learned especially by novices? How would we teach C++ (e.g., at the university) if it gets larger and larger?
40:53 In the context of C++’s zero-cost abstractions philosophy, how do you see future proposals for making bounds checking in std::vector both safer and more efficient?
47:13 Are C++ safety initiatives arriving too late to fend off the growing adoption of Rust for “safe” low-level development?
55:25 What is the status of the profiles proposal in C++? Will some of it be part of C++26 or C++29?
57:35 The Common Package Specification, which looked very promising, seems stalled. Why is tooling in the language not a priority?
59:11 What do you think of std::execution / P2300R10? The API changed a lot across papers, and to me is quite a piece of work for library implementers to integrate.
1:04:35 Aren’t you afraid that reflection might be misused too much (e.g., use it for serialization)?
1:06:46 If local uninitialized variables are no longer UB, how will they behave? Could you please elaborate a bit on that?
1:11:30 How is the Contracts TS coming along? What are your thoughts on Contract Based Programming, in general?
1:15:56 Any chance of having type erasure (mainly std::any) in MSVC reimplemented not on top of RTTI? Unfortunately the current implementation makes it unusable in places where symbol names are left behind by RTTI.
1:17:38 What happened with the official publication of the C++23 standard?
1:22:31 Preview of my keynote next month at Meeting C++.
Time: social hour starts at 19:00 CEST, AMA starts at 20:00 CEST
I’m looking forward to your technical questions about C++26 evolution, cppfront, Rust, reflection, safety and security, concurrency and parallelism, and software in general… and optionally questions about SF/fantasy novels and cinema, but then I might ask some similar questions in return. 😇
Then next month I’m also looking forward to speaking at Meeting C++ 2024 in person in Berlin, and seeing many of you there — thanks again, Jens, for kindly inviting me to both.
Sutter’s Mill