cppfront is Herb Sutter's "experimental compiler from a potential C++ 'syntax 2' to current modern C++ 'syntax 1'". It's in the very early stages of experimental development. Check out the "Can C++ be 10x Simpler and Safer?" CppCon 2022 talk on Youtube for an idea of what cppfront is all about.
- cppfront repository
- "Can C++ be 10x Simpler and Safer?" talk (Contains plenty of live cppfront demos)
- My cppfront wrapper repository
As of commit 8dd89ec8c9cfe9633286b2768ad0404455e342c7,
the latest MinGW ld.exe (GNU binutils 2.40) distributed by msys2 fails to link cppfront.exe when
compiling with optimizations off (Debug mode). If you're building in Debug mode with MinGW g++,
you must use the -fuse-ld=lld flag to use LLVM's lld linker in place of ld (need to install Clang first).
You must set the CMake options -DGCMAKE_ADDITIONAL_COMPILER_FLAGS='fuse-ld=lld' and -DGCMAKE_ADDITIONAL_LINK_TIME_FLAGS='-fuse-ld=lld'.
The cppfront-cmake-wrapper allows me to decouple the cppfront build from the GCMake tool itself. That way I can just modify the build in the wrapper repository without needing to update any GCMake dependency configuration scripts.
The wrapper repository is also a way to just build and install cppfront using CMake, which is nice.
NOTE: Using an existing installation of CppFront is required when using Emscripten and recommended when cross-compiling in general.
With any major C++20 supporting compiler:
git clone 'git@github.com:scupit/cppfront-cmake-wrapper.git'
cd cppfront-cmake-wrapper
cmake -B build/ # ... any other CMake options such as -G 'Ninja'
cmake --build build/ --parallel
sudo cmake --install build/ # Or run in an Administrator prompt in WindowsFull build details can be found in the cppfront-cmake-wrapper repository README.