On 03/06/2010 08:44 PM, Andreas Masur wrote:
Personally, I do not necessarily think that the language should support every little area that is possible.
Yes, pulling every nifty feature into the language support library is wrong. But I don't want that either. Some things I've mentioned are no less fundamental than filesystem support or threading nowdays. To be specific, I'm speaking of serialization and ASIO here.
Languages should focus on providing the fundamental architecture instead. One can certainly argue about what is considered fundamental as different users have different opinions and needs. From my point of view, any language with support for handling libraries in an easy and flexible manner - allowing users to pick the library that fits their needs best in a particular situation - is going to be successful in the near future. As you said, this will add complexity, however, may be one of the goals for a language should actually be trying to remove this complexity while dealing with libraries....
Surely, that is a good direction for the language improvement. It's kind of in line with my wish for modules support on the language level. It's a pity that in current shape the standard does not state any guarantees regarding parts of the application that are in different modules, nor does it define any means to define interfaces and integrate modules. However, integrating libraries in an application also involve things that are clearly out of C++ scope, such as compatibility, configuration and building issues. I doubt that C++ committee is able to help in this area. Therefore I still think that a rich language support library is required.