The Curse of Backwards Compatibility

This week we chat with Harald Achitz about a new ISO mirror in Sweden, the C++ community - in Sweden, and worldwide - and other topics (which may or may not include Cobol) We explore the underbelly of getting involved with standards work - not just the C++ one, as well as community building, language evolution and static analysis.

We're back! Again! And so is Dave Abrahams, after a long period outside the C++ community. So we thought we should hear about what he's been up to and what he's doing now. We end up getting some fascinating insights into the design and evolution of the Swift programming language, which Dave joined the team behind quite early on. While Swift draws inspiration from many languages, the core of the team behind it - including Dave - were C++ experts - but experts who wanted to take from the best, yet learn from the mistakes, of the past. Listen to this episode to find out if they pulled it off!

This week, err... month, no, episode, we're joined by Anastasia Kazakova for a cross-over show with No Diagnostic Required - the other show that Phil co-hosts with Anastasia. We cover articles on static analysis, move semantics and expressive interfaces, three new std proposals, then chat about conferences, especially CppCon, which just finished for this year.

This episode is slightly different to the normal. Rather than being a pure cpp.chat session, it's a recording of an interview, conducted by KDAB, of a panel of C++ experts, including our own Jon Kalb - but also past cpp.chat guests Ivan Čukić and Jens Weller, as well as Matthias Kalle Dalheimer. The interview is around the future of C++, but also takes a look at its past and present.

In this episode we welcome back Tony and Klaus to talk about the [SOLID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID) Principles, and how they relate (or not), to C++. Tony is about to give a keynote at C++ Now about his take on the SOLID Principles. Klaus has been giving a talk on applying SOLID to C++ and even Phil has recently given a talk on a similar topic. Perhaps somebody should have mentioned this to Tony before! Along the way we get plenty of SOLID advice, discover what the single responsibility is that Tony's objects have, what COLID is, who is going to argue against Liskov, and who is just there for the jokes. The answer, of course, is: it depends.

This week we get back on track and chat with Christopher Di Bella from Google about working on the Chrome OS toolchain - including his newly finished concepts implementation. We talk a bit about the practicalities of bringing C++ 20 features to compilers, interoperating GCC and Clang and how to deal, portably, with std libraries that can’t be implemented without compiler support.

This week we have a special panel made up of members of the C++ community, joined by members of the Rust community. We have a round table discussion of how the two languages relate, differ - and how entwined their fates may be. We also learn why Rust doesn't have random numbers, but why it's lucky to have Burnt Sushi.

This week we chat with Isabella (Izzy) Muerte about modules, build systems and more. We talk about xyr new job (which, at the time of recording, was with Netlify), and how that still involves working on build systems - but particularly CMake, where xe has found an intriguing special use for emoji! We segue into a discussion about modules, which Izzy was definitely down on a couple of years ago, and what xe thinks of them now. To avoid spoilers don’t read the title!

This week we chat with Tony Van Eerd about what comes after Post Modern C++, what the single most important principle for good code is, and what Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare have to do with all this. The off-by-one jokes are regular, or at least semi-regular, but what proposals has Tony killed? And how can opening your mind to unexpected ways of thinking lead you to better code?

This week we chat with a Conor Hoekstra, about dreaming in algorithms, being a programming language addict and writing beautiful code. We look at what Conor is jealous of in other languages, why his competitive coding entry came dead last, and why he really likes sugar and dopamine. And is it really true that no-one is listening to Sean Parent? Note that this episode was recorded over four months before editing, so the news items are a bit stale.