On Saturday, the ISO C++ committee completed the second-last design meeting of C++26, held in Hagenberg, Austria. There is just one meeting left before the C++26 feature set is finalized in June 2025 and draft C++26 is sent out for its international comment ballot (aka “Committee Draft” or “CD”), and C++26 is on track to be technically finalized two more meetings after that in early 2026.
Hardened standard library is going to make the times when I am forced to use C++ a lot more pleasant. Does anyone know how you will enable it? I think it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’re not going to take the sensible route of making it opt-out, and if it’s too difficult to enable nobody is going to bother.
I think it’s pretty much guaranteed that they’re not going to take the sensible route of making it opt-out,
Because that’s not the sensible route in the future, whether we like it or not. Hardened STL is being announced in the papers as “we are going to start with these silly one-line fixes that in theory should perturb no one, but as we iterate over this we’re gonna start breaking things”, which is not what you want to hear from the default.
One good example: placing enforced bounds check into the
operator[]ofstd::array<>of all places. People keep telling me that I should be using std::array instead of normal C arrays, but then punish me for using std::array? That ends up making people revert to the True Old Ways That Work (aka: C arrays).Bounds checks are not punishing you. Obviously the right way to do this would be to make
operator[]be bounds checked by default but only if you use-std=c++29or whatever, and then also add a.at_unchecked()method for when you want to opt out of the bounds checks.
One of the reasons they got through with it is that the big three already has it, so I guess… Update and read the documentation of your compiler of choice?