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tw1984 | 10 days ago
41 years after its invention, C++ still doesn't have networking support in its stdlib. excuses after excuses, they have millions justifications on why the stdlib doesn't need networking. but in the same time, some bureaucratic "committee members" struggling with their midlife crisis want you to waste your life on stuff like Std:Is_within_lifetime in the era of AI.
what a bloody load of joke!
Can't wait to see some high accurate coding agents start being able to port C++ code to rust with minimum human interventions to liberate people from the most bureaucratic nonsense in CS history. Some AI native language incorporated with concepts that were too complicated for human would be even better.
it has never been a better time to depreciate dinosaurs like C++!
ethin|10 days ago
tialaramex|10 days ago
1: Some of networking is vocabulary and so it obviously should live in your stdlib, and indeed for C++ it should be in what they call "freestanding", like Rust's core, where core::net::IPv4Addr lives. It is very silly if the software in this cheap embedded device and this PC web browser can't even agree on what an IP address is in 2026.
2: In practice the C++ stdlib is used as a dumping ground for stuff that ought to live in a package manager if C++ was a good language. That was true when networking was first proposed and it's still true now. It's why RCU and Hive are both in C++ 26. Those aren't vocabulary, and they aren't needed by the vast majority of programmers, but their proponents wanted them to be available out of the box and in C++ that means they must live in the stdlib.
tw1984|8 days ago
> what happens when we try to add extraneous, hard to define problems to the STL? Do you really want to add something way more complicated than a regular expression engine to C++ (networking)
"they have millions justifications on why the stdlib doesn't need networking. but in the same time, some bureaucratic "committee members" struggling with their midlife crisis want you to waste your life on stuff like Std:Is_within_lifetime in the era of AI."
totally as expected.
> Are you next going to demand a GUI toolkit too? Maybe an entire game engine and Vulkan/WebGPU implementation too while we're at it
please keep such extremely stupid ideas to yourself, you are the only person here suggesting having GUI and WebGPU stuff in C++.
your entire skillset could be replaced by a 7B LLM model if you can't even tell the difference of networking & GUI for a general purpose language like C++.
ksherlock|10 days ago
swiftcoder|10 days ago
Networking is defacto in the standard library, because C++ standard library is almost always supplemented by whatever C functionality is lying around, and POSIX networking exists.
That they haven't felt the need to provide a more useful abstraction on top of the POSIX layer (and hey, maybe abstract over Microsoft's variant in the process) in the past 3 decades does seem like a miss