Sutter just announced that C++0x will have support for lambdas and closures.
It looks from the N2550 report that these things are motivated by a desire for some syntactic sugar to make using STL algorithms easier (which is understandable), but I hope this will lead to more first-class support for the functional programming paradigm. It has long had support for function objects, but it would be difficult to write predominantly functional programs in C++. I hope it just got a little bit easier.
My question(s): will these lambdas be serializable? In Lisp, there are a couple of ways you could ship around a closure. Ultimately, if you really wanted to, you could express the lambda as a regular list, transmit it, and then call “compile” on it. Since C++ doesn’t have a built-in way to write and compile code from within the language itself, it will have to be somewhat different (or maybe it’s time to start writing a functor serializer for the boost library).
I am a huge C++ aficionado, and this news excites me. A comment over on news.yc captures my sentiments pretty well:
Lambda functions and closures in C++. E-gads man! Wasn’t the language complex enough already!
I have to say: I love it. C++ has always been my favorite language that I don’t program in. It’s like kung-fu for programmers. You can attack any problem. But most times we don’t need kung-fu.
There’s nothing like “getting in the zone” with a good C++ program. It’s a thing of beauty. And if you’re doing stuff that you have to use the tool, like writing drivers, low-level stuff, doing some “break the rules” programming, it’s the best there is. I wrote a shell extender for windows many years ago in C++. I got to change the desktop and file system to work the way I wanted it to. Very neat stuff.
The sad fact is that most of the time you can make more money writing something with a much higher level language. And you can make it faster and adapt to the market faster. So C++ is a tougher language to use for startups, in my opinion (although it is still my favorite)
Can you imagine the trouble you can get into with macros, lambda functions, and unsafe pointers? How about throwing i some operator overloading? It’s like a playground for nuclear weapons.
Andrew Connell
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