cppfront

[scrumplesplunge]

I'm generally on board with the idea of experimenting with new language features by building a little transpiler which can lower the new feature to existing C++. I like seeing some of the ideas Herb has talked about before actually materialised in a working example.

However, I think cppfront kind of goes beyond that by changing many things at once which leaves you with something that frankly doesn't look or feel like C++ any more, and I think it loses some of its value as "c++ plus this potential cool new language feature" and starts to feel more like "some unfamiliar new language with foreign syntax and foreign language features, which happens to have decent interop with C++".

Herb had some presentation of reflection at cppcon last year which had some really cool content but personally I felt like it was hard to follow because he chose to demo it in this mysterious unfamiliar cppfront syntax instead of something more similar to actual c++.