Abstract

This talk will introduce and motivate my current work on helping further support for generic programming in C++. Particularly, the work is on extending the Clang C++ compiler with support for concepts.

An explicit notion of concepts was supposed to be a major, if not the most important, addition to the language’s planned new standard: C++0x. However, the feature recently found itself dramatically voted out, not for reasons of disagreements on whether to add the feature, but rather for disagreements on how to add it. Not even the only working prototype, ConceptGCC, was enough to help members of the committee reach a consensus…

My work consists of (1) carrying on the vision intended for ConceptGCC, but from a friendlier and more efficient platform, (2) concretely analyze the issues that led to this dramatic vote, and (3) determine the right way to add the feature, for proposal in future planned standards.

In the talk, we will review the ways in which concepts are currently supported in the language – which is implicitly, the various main proposals that were presented to make them explicit (three), and the ways in which the prototype implementation could have been more helpful; hence why and how my current work is intended to complement the previous efforts.