<story><title>The first new build of Circle, a new C++20 compiler, since April 2022 is online</title><url>https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/README.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fidgewidge</author><text>Yes yes yes. Everything about this document screams good sense and logic.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s clear why Carbon looks the way it does - they want to do what Kotlin did for Java and using the same strategy. But, it won&amp;#x27;t work. They understood Kotlin&amp;#x27;s strategy as binary compatibility at the per source file level but that&amp;#x27;s only half the story. The quiet monster of Kotlin&amp;#x27;s success is j2k which is a source translation tool built into the IDE. It rewrites a Java file to Kotlin and then applies all the intelligence in the ide plug-in to clean up the results, meaning even idioms get translated properly.&lt;p&gt;Jetbrains could do that because they were developing the IDE plug-in alongside the compiler from day one, and because Java is quite easy to parse, and because Kotlin deliberately constrained itself to Java semantics even when sub optimal.&lt;p&gt;I had high hopes for Carbon when I first heard about it but that number of proposals without even having a compiler is crazy. How do you port existing code? You can only use it for newly added code, presumably, and only if your new code doesn&amp;#x27;t interact with any c++ using the bits the carbon team don&amp;#x27;t like? That&amp;#x27;s light years from the type of interop that made Kotlin a success.&lt;p&gt;Sounds like this guy actually understands the problem in depth. I hope he&amp;#x27;s able to attract customers, though it&amp;#x27;s a tough sell to make your company codebase depends on a language maintained by only one guy.</text></comment>
<story><title>The first new build of Circle, a new C++20 compiler, since April 2022 is online</title><url>https://github.com/seanbaxter/circle/blob/master/new-circle/README.md</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pjmlp</author><text>From all possible wannabe be replacements for C++  that poped up in 2022, Circle is definitely the one that has the most going for it.&lt;p&gt;Everything else requires rewriting everything, and they can only support a limited subset of C++ features, so if the goal is full compatibility with existing code they aren&amp;#x27;t going to achieve it anyway.&lt;p&gt;For full rewrites, we already have enough alternatives with more maturity years behind them.</text></comment>