Zeta

A total C++ standard library replacement, inspired by Zig.

This library is meant to be used instead of the C++ library, not to complement it.

Goals

• Emphasis on explicit control
  • Avoiding hidden behavior where possible (i.e constructors and destructors)
  • Errors as values instead of exceptions
  • No implicit allocations, save for optional, "managed" types
• Functionality on par with the C++ standard library, but without the technical debt of libc
• Minimal use of libc, and only when absolutely necessary
• Readable implementation
• Support for the C++98 standard

Reasoning

Observations:

• Zig has been gaining a lot of traction for its elegance and simplicity
• While neither as elegant nor simplistic as Zig, people still generally like C for the same reasons
• People often shoehorn modern language features into C such as OOP, namespaces, and generics using rudimentary techniques like void*, function prefixes, and macros, respectively
  • Even old standards of C++ formally support these features
• For modern projects, people who choose C++ over C will choose so because C++ is more expressive and featureful
• People gripe about modern C++'s complexity

Fact:

• The initial trajectory of C++'s evolution was heavily influenced by C
  • "C++ began as a fork of an early, pre-standardized C, and was designed to be mostly source-and-link compatible with C compilers of the time" source: Wikipedia

Theories:

• The C++ standard library carried forward the shortcomings of the C standard library
  • The C++ standard library was built on an unstable foundation
• The current trajectory of C++'s evolution is, in part, dictated by the development of the C++ standard library
• The C++ standard library commonly hides memory management behind implicit allocations happening in constructors and destructors
  • The benefit, in the best case, is that when your resources go out of scope, they are automatically cleaned up for you
  • The drawback is that allocations are harder to keep track of because you are discouraged from explicitly making them
• The C++98 standard lacks the complexity of modern C++ (r-value references, move semantics, smart pointers, attributes, noexcept) source: cppreference.com
  • This is a double-edged sword, as it also lacks nice modern features such as lambdas, iterators, the auto keyword, and nullptr
• The C++98 standard still makes much-needed improvements over C (templates, namespaces, typecasting, OOP) source: cplusplus.com
  • Some may argue OOP is actually a detriment to programming, but bad OOP is possible in both C and C++, C++ just gives you a way to express it succinctly

Conclusion:

• People still like C because it's simple
• C++98 is about as simple as C, but with helpful syntatic sugar for features that programmers already hack into C
• C++ standards beyond C++98 didn't need more complex language features, they just needed a better standard library to work from
• We may not need a "better C++" (i.e. Rust, Zig, Carbon), but a better library for C++98