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Comment by tialaramex

The entire I/O streams (where std::cout comes from) feature is garbage, if this was an independent development there is no way that WG21 would have taken it, the reason it's in C++ 98 and thus still here today is that it's Bjarne's baby. The reason not to take it is that it's contradictory to the "Don't use operator overloading for unrelated operations" core idea. Bjarne will insist that "actually" these operators somehow always meant streaming I/O but his evidence is basically the same library feature he's trying to justify. No other language does this, and it's not because they can't it's because it was a bad idea when it was created, it was still a bad idea in 1998, the only difference today is that C++ has a replacement.

The modern fmt-inspired std::print and std::println etc. are much nicer, preserving all the type checking but losing terrible ideas like stored format state, and localisation by default. The biggest problem is that today C++ doesn't have a way to implement this for your own types easily, Barry illustrates a comfortable way this could work in C++ 26 via reflection which on that issue closes the gap with Rust's #[derive(Debug)].

parent tialaramex 2 years ago

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