Channel 9 have just posted up a Q&A session filmed at the end of this years ‘C++ And Beyond’ conference.

This features, of course, the ‘three amigos’: Andrei Alexandrescu, Scott Meyers, and Herb Sutter. Actually they seem to have now been renamed the ‘big three’… maybe they don’t actually like each other that much! What is for sure is that each has their own opinions and they are not necessarily always all in agreement.

However, one thing they certainly were all in agreement with was regarding the future of C++, and the message was very upbeat indeed. As most of the top compilers can already handle most of the C++11 standard (this was not the case for the ’98 standard… it took years for some to catch up) it seems that developers are already embracing the new features in production code.

Herb highlighted that he is seeing more and more interest in C++, and gave the example that there is increasing attendance at standardization meetings. Although we are unlikely to see any new language features for a few years, work is already under way on libraries, and this is not only progressing but “accelerating”.

It seemed a large proportion of the talk was about ‘static if’ and ‘template meta programming’ so I was very interested to hear Scott, after patiently listening for a while, point out the “elephant in the room”: these subjects are only of interest to a very small minority of developers. Personally, this is certainly the way I feel about these subjects.

Herb followed this up by expressing that template meta programming should not be what we hold up as mainstream C++ style as it gives “C++ a bad name”. [Attempt to weave a feeble joke between this quote and Scott’s haircut edited out…]

Keep an eye on the Channel 9 site as we should be seeing more videos from the excellent ‘C++ And Beyond’ soon.