hylo VS cppfront

Or Val[0], now called Hylo (for a good reason), or V[1].

[0] https://www.hylo-lang.org

The evolution of C++ has been a multi-decade history of dealing with difficult reality.

I have great hope that Herb can create with his cppfront project “The Very Best of C++” to carry that tremendous legacy forward.

If I was to throw my hat into a “C++ successor”, it would be https://www.hylo-lang.org/ with its “all the safeties” and “tell you when you’re doing it sub-optimal” approach.

Paper: https://2023.splashcon.org/details/iwaco-2023-papers/5/Borro...

> Hylo is a language for high-level systems programming that promises safety without loss of efficiency. It is based on mutable value semantics, a discipline that emphasizes the independence of values to support local reasoning. The result—in contrast with approaches based on sophisticated aliasing restrictions—is an efficient, expressive language with a simple type system and no need for lifetime annotations.

> Safety guarantees in Hylo programs are verified by an abstract interpreter processing an intermediate representation, Hylo IR, that models lifetime properties with ghost instructions. Further, lifetime constraints are used to eliminate unnecessary memory allocations predictably.

https://www.hylo-lang.org/

https://github.com/Hylo-lang/Hylo

A model without lifetimes is also being explored in other languages, e.g. in Hylo. It sacrifices expressiveness, but on the other hand you don't have to deal with explicit lifetimes!

Why go through all the trouble when you can do this: https://www.hylo-lang.org/ and not spend a second thinking of lifetimes? No, copies will not be issued unless necessary.

Or why not keep exploring this idea as well? More research-oriented than the first one right now, though, so take it with a grain of salt: https://vale.dev/

Get rid of references at the cost of some expressivity (see Hylo, formerly Val)

CPP2/cppfront:

https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront

I hope we see this in C++26 as optional mode i.e. #safe and #unsafe and same for #impdef or so.

C++23 is done. But C++ is not! In this talk, the author shares his personal perspectives on an ongoing and very active evolution of C++, updates on his cppfront experimental compiler, and why compatibility is essential to the further success of the C++ development.

https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront

But his side project at Microsoft didn't gain traction with gcc, clang, etc and everybody else in the industry. So at this point, the C++ committee will be perceived as "so far behind" ... because there's nothing for them to vote on.

C++ has major flaws that cannot be rectified without serious breaking changes. With that said, Herb has been experimenting with a new cpp frontend with sane defaults [1].

In my opinion, the world is on standby until Anders Hejlsberg feels like tackling a modern, next generation systems language.

[1] https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront