The Future of C++

Bjarne Stroustrup began C with Classes in 1979, as a better C that supports object-oriented programming, generic programming, and data abstraction. In 1983, it became C++ (although many argue it should have been ++C). Nearing the end of the century, 1998, a C++ ANSI-ISO standard was created. Sometime in the near future, C++0x is coming along.

Being that C++0x was expected to come out between 2000 and 2009, they abbreviated 200x to 0x. Nothing hexadecimal related.

C++0x is considered to be the first major revision to the C++ standard, which, as said above, has been around for just about a decade. The following features are some of the things we should be expecting from C++ next year (with comments!):

• multithreading support (this will ease development for many C++ frameworks)
• lambda functions (inherited from C#... sorry for the pun)
• automatic types and type determinations (did anyone say auto from C#?)
• improvements in templates
• generalized constant expressions (I've been waiting for something like this for a while now)
• initialization problems fixed
• range-based for loop (seems like the for..each loop in Java and foreach in Python)
• better ways to create objects
• fixes to enums (strongly-typed now)
• user-defined literals
• upgrades to the Standard Library
• tuples (the good old days of Haskell...)
• regular expressions (now Qt doesn't have to have a QRegExp class anymore)
• a better way to generate random numbers (finally!)

Even with all these new features, C++0x is still going to try to be backwards-compatible with C++98 and C99. More detailed information can be found here and on this blog.

Others, however, argue that existing C++ frameworks and APIs won't benefit much from the upgrade.