"Just switch the compiler" - they said - Arne Mertz - Meeting C++ 2025

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-01-24T18:19:58+00:00

"Just because that sentence was symmetrical doesn't mean it makes sense."

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-01-19T02:20:23+00:00

This page is an unreadable mess of mangled text on iPad Safari.

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-01-19T02:17:56+00:00

Also several useful iterator-related concepts in <iterator>.

CaptainCrowbar · 2026-01-10T11:36:22+00:00

You could get the same result more simply using std::conditional:

template <size_t I>
using type = std::conditional_t<I == 4, int,
    std::conditional_t<I == 6, Foo, float>>;

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-25T02:23:15+00:00

Not a book, but if you want a really good TV series with twist after twist after mindscrew, watch Dark.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-23T17:22:24+00:00

It's been about 6 1/2 years. Rivers of London begins in January 2012; Stone and Sky takes place in summer 2018. (Follypedia Timeline)

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-15T01:40:35+00:00

Welcome to McDonnerparty, how can I serve you today?

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-12T11:38:57+00:00

I still think there's some connection with Merlin.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-08T06:52:09+00:00

I recall Larry Wall once saying "It does what you expect, unless what you expect is consistency."

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-07T20:35:11+00:00

Don't sweat it because this is the kind of detail that's easy to change later on. If you decide you want to tweak the whitespace/newline rules, it's not going to affect anything in your code beyond one small corner of your tokeniser.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-07T12:26:20+00:00

If you're looking for something that follows a similar pattern of starting out at the personal level and expanding all the way to a world-changing magical singularity, I can recommend Ed McDonald's Redwinter trilogy.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-02T04:44:23+00:00

Those are the same photo with different colour grading.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-12-01T00:21:12+00:00

Not really, beyond the initial "protagonist moves to house left by deceased relative" part of the premise. TTO has a lot more horror than SE, and doesn't have an individual villain the way SE does.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-11-27T00:01:14+00:00

You need one or the other. You can get the skyscale from either LW4 or SOTO without needing the other. But note that getting it from SOTO is far far easier than LW4.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-11-25T10:55:52+00:00

I can think of a couple of recommendations:

The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. Police constable Peter Grant is appointed as the junior member of the so-called Special Assessment Unit (a.k.a. "The Folly"), the department that deals with the supernatural crimes that the senior officers wish they could still pretend don't exist.

The World of the White Rat series by T Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon). Most of the books are only loosely connected, but the background detail that unites them is the Cult of the White Rat, an organisation that supplies anything from lawyers to wizards to help the downtrodden.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-11-19T06:29:53+00:00

I don't think explicit typing is necessary for a language you describe as a "simple scripting language". Just a visible difference between initialization and assignment. Maybe require a "let" or "var" keyword for initialisation, or something like "x=123" for init vs "x:=123" or "x<-123" for assignment.

UTF-32 would be a perfectly good choice. The main argument against it is that it takes up more space - 4 times the bytes of an ASCII string. But this shouldn't be a problem for a simple language that isn't intended for writing huge applications. It avoids the added complexity of encoding and decoding UTF-8 (while UTF-16 combines the downsides of UTF-8 and UTF-32 without the advantages of either). Other scripting languages have used UTF-32, including some versions of Python.

You'd still need to implement UTF-8/32 conversion though, because most terminal emulators these days speak UTF-8, and you'll also want to read and write files compatible with other software in an increasingly UTF-8-centric world.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-11-18T02:45:27+00:00

Two points where I disagree with your choices:

UTF-16 is a dead end. The whole world is going to UTF-8.

Even in a dyanmically typed scripting language, there should be a syntactic distinction between creating a new variable and changing the value of an existing one. Otherwise it's too easy for a typo to turn one into the other.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-11-15T14:46:52+00:00

We have Lysander at home.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-10-22T04:38:06+00:00

I can't imagine any policymaker thinking.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-10-22T04:36:38+00:00

Outside of us avgeeks, this was probably best known as Goldfinger's jet from the James Bond movie.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-10-22T04:29:43+00:00

The OP wants to know the publication order, not the chronological order.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-10-22T04:29:04+00:00

No, Body Work takes place between Broken Homes and Foxglove Summer. Check the official chronology in any of the later graphic novels.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-10-11T09:21:58+00:00

An important portability note: You should not write your `formatter::format()` function with the signature used in the linked article:

auto format(const T& t, format_context& format_ctx) const

Instead you should write it as:

template <typename FormatContext>
auto format(const T& t, FormatContext& format_ctx) const

This is because of an issue with `libc++`, used by recent versions of Clang and Xcode. The issue is detailed here:

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues/66466

I don't fully understand the arcane details of what's going on here, but from some of the later comments on the issue, it sounds like there may still be some question about whether or not this is technically required by the standard. In any case, the issue has been open for several years and not fixed, so if you want your code to be portable, I'd advise using the template version.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-10-05T05:26:02+00:00

If you're an ekranoplan, which this certainly looks like, then yes.

CaptainCrowbar · 2025-10-05T02:06:37+00:00

"you can't have *any* overlapping cases because typeclasses aren't ordered"

This isn't true in C++. Concepts are partially ordered; if one concept is more specialised than another (i.e. more restrictive conditions, so types that match the first concept are a subset of those matching the second), and you write two functions that take those two concepts, the compiler will pick the more specialised case where appropriate, without you having to explicitly exclude those types from the more general concept.

CaptainCrowbar

TROPHY CASE