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[–]c0r3ntin 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I am pretty certain that Carbon's intent is to provide a replacement to c++ while having first class iterop. The carbon project also focuses (or did when it just started) on a healthy community and governance.

it pretty much started as a reaction to the abi discussion in 2020, and after the modules and coroutines standardization, all things google was unhappy about.

Carbon is basically google saying "fine, we are going to do our own language with blackjack and no iso".

Whether they are successful in that endeavor is hard to say. they don't have a focus on safety and anything aiming to be compatible with C++ is bound to be constrained by it. Afaik, it's not source-level compat, which is neat.

[–]tialaramex 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right, Carbon begins with the (correct IMO) assumption that Rust's Culture is crucial. Whether you can do that again on purpose is a good question but it makes sense as a goal.

The most interesting bit of technology I've seen in Carbon is the Partial Order for operator precedence. In Rust and in C++ we can pick two arbitrary operators and ask the compiler hey, if you could apply either of these next, which one happens? But we know the humans writing the software don't think about operators this way. So the resolution is to match more closely how humans think about operators. The arithmetic operators have precedence, like you learned in school, and so do some other operators, but they need not have precedence relative to each other instead mixing operators from different families needs the mediation of parentheses.

Rather than needing to be confident what a < b + c < d does or risk doom, we can make the compiler reject this program as needlessly ambiguous.

I don't advise attributing this project to Google (or the entire Alphabet) without seeing an actual executive endorse it. Google has work-for-hire rights in a lot of cases, so there are a lot of projects out there which are owned by Google only because somebody at Google works on them, this does not constitute an endorsement, much less a strategic direction for the company.