C++ at the End of 2022

I must admit that some previous years for C++ might feel a bit “boring” and “stable”. New features, new standard every three years, meetings, conferences… life as usual (apart from some additional World/Economy/public Health events…). This year seems different as it looks like a “breakpoint” in the history of C++… and who knows where it will lead us.

Let’s have a look at some things that happened this year.

Reports from previous years: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

Disclaimer: the view presented here is mine, subjective, and does not represent the opinion of the ISO C++ committee or companies I work for.

A Brief Introduction  

In 2022 the world tried to go back to “normal,” and regarding C++, this was visible through several “real”/live conferences and live ISO committee meetings. Compiler vendors are busy completing support for C++20 and even some C++23 elements. And the ISO committee works on the final parts of C++23 and some features for C++26.

Still, around the middle of the year, we started seeing some “cracks” as a few influential groups announced new programming languages. First, we have Val (led by David Abrahams), then Carbon (supported by Google), and then CppFront (led by Herb Sutter).

The next thing that looks curious is the improvements and the feedback loop we can see in the community. For example, Vittorio Romeo addressed a long-standing debugging performance issue for std::move, std::forward, and some other small routines. The positive thing is that vendors relatively quickly implemented those suggestions.

Overall, I see the following major trends and topics in 2022:

• C++23 feature freeze
• C++20 adoption
• New languages
• Feedback loop and better tools

What’s more, we can add another point: ChatGPT Announcement. While it’s not strictly related to C++, it can hugely impact how we write programs, learn and even teach. In short, ChatGPT proved that it can be a handy assistant for various tasks, so we’ll see

Read on to get the complete picture.

Timeline  

To set a background, let’s see the main events that happened:

Date	Event
7 February	ISO C++ Committee meeting Zoom plenary
15 February	Visual Studio 2022 17.1
25 March	Clang14.0
6 April	ACCU, till 9th April
13 April 2022	Boost 1.79: Major release now available
2 May	Val Announced at Cpp Now
6 May	GCC 12.1
10 May	MSVC’s STL Completes /std:c++20 (for the second time :)
22 July	Carbon announced at C++North
25 July	ISO C++ Committee meeting Zoom plenary, C++23 is frozen now
9 August	Visual Studio 2022 17.3
19 August	GCC 12.2
6 September	Clang 15.0
11 September	CppCon, till 16th Sept
16 September	CppFront announced at CppCon
7 November	ISO C++ Committee meeting - Kona Hybrid, till 12th Nov
8 November	Visual Studio 2022 17.4
16 November	Meeting C++, till 19th Nov
30 November 2022	Chat GTP Announced
14 December	Boost 1.81: Major release now available
22 December	libstdc++: Implement C++20 time zone support in <chrono>

Here’s a video summary of this table:

Compiler Support for C++17  

I don’t want to be boring this time. All major compilers support C++17… there are only a few exceptions, like missing floating point support for from_chars, to_chars, or issues with parallel algorithms.

Please note that since GCC 11, you get C++17 compilation mode by default, see this article. As of Clang 16 you’ll also get gnu++17 by default, see this article

If you want to learn all features of C++17, here’s my overview:

Compiler Support For C++20  

It’s the end of 2022, and only MSVC (VS 2022 17.0) has complete support for the Standard. GCC 13.0 (almost released) has the most features, while Clang (16.0) is slightly behind. The main features lacking or “problematic” are modules, std::format, std::chrono additions, and coroutines. But we’re slowly getting there.

Here are some of the best features added to the Standard:

• Modules
• Coroutines
• Concepts and Concepts in the Standard Library
• Ranges
• operator <=> and its use in the Standard Library, simplified operator rewriting rules
• Text formatting - std::format
• Calendar and timezones
• jthread, semaphores, more atomics, barriers, and more concurrency stuff
• consteval and constinit
• constexpr algorithms, vector, string, memory allocations
• std::span
• and more!

And here’s the table with compiler notes for language features:

Compiler	missing features/notes
GCC 11	Only Modules are in the “partial” state
Clang 14/16	Modules in partial, coroutines in partial, CTAD improvements missing
MSVC 16.9	Full support!

Regarding library features:

Compiler	Notes
GCC libstdc++, GCC 13	almost all support!
Clang libc++, as of Clang 14	missing: jthread, Standard library header units, make_unique_for_overwrite, some atomics missing,
MSVC STL	Full support as of MSVC 16.9, 17.0!

You can track the status @cppreference - C++20 support.

If you want to learn all features, you can see this great and super popular blog post by Oleksandr Koval:

All C++20 core language features with examples

This year at C++ Stories, I also covered a lot of features from the new standard:

The C++23 Status  

This year was notable for the new Standard as it got into “feature freeze” mode. The committee announced this stage mid-year, after the June ISO meeting.

Some language features and their current support in compilers:

Feature	GCC	Clang	MSVC
Make () more optional for lambdas	11.0	13.0	x
if consteval	12.0	14.0	x
Deducing this	x	x	VS 2022 17.2 (partial)
Multidimensional subscript operator	12.0	x	x
#elifdef and #elifndef	12.0	13.0	x
static operator()	13.0	16.0	x
static operator[]	13.0	16.0	x
Support for UTF-8 as a portable source file encoding	13.0	15.0	VS 2015

And one of the most exciting things that were added and also went viral was the addition of P2718R0 which is a refinement for P2012 “Fix the range‐based for loop”.

In short, you’ll be able to write:

std::vector<std::string> createStrings();
for (char c : createStrings().at(0)) // <<!
{
   // some code...
}

As of C++20, the above for-loop statement has UB because we access a temporary object whose lifetime has ended. In C++23, all temporary objects in that loop expression will extend their lifetime, not just the first one.

And library:

Feature	GCC	Clang	MSVC
Stacktrace library	x	x	x
std::is_scoped_enum	11.0	12.0	VS 2022 17.0
contains() for strings and string views	11.0	12.0	VS 2022 17.0
constexpr for std::optional and std::variant	12.0	13.0	VS 2022 17.1
std::out_ptr(), std::inout_ptr()	x	x	VS 2022 17.0
ranges::starts_with() and ranges::ends_with()	x	x	VS 2022 17.1
DR: std::format() improvements	13.0	16.0	VS 2022 17.2
ranges zip	13.0	15.0	VS 2022 17.3
Monadic operations for std::optional	12.0	14.0	VS 2022 17.2
<expected>	12.0	16.0	VS 2022 17.3
ranges::to	x	x	VS 2022 17.4
Pipe support for user-defined range adaptors	x	x	VS 2022 17.4
ranges::iota(), ranges::shift_*()	x	x	VS 2022 17.4
views::join_with	13.0	x	VS 2022 17.4
views::chunk_* and views::slide	13.0	x	VS 2022 17.3
views::chunk_by	13.0	x	VS 2022 17.3
<flat_map>, <flat_set>	x	x	x
Formatted output library <print>	x	x	x
Formatting ranges	x	x	x
constexpr for integral overloads of std::to_chars() and std::from_chars()	13.0	16.0	VS 2022 17.4
Standard Library Modules	x	x	VS 2022 17.5*
Monadic operations for std::expected	x	x	x

ISO C++ Meetings  

This year we had three ISO meetings:

• Two virtual, single-day, plenary voting: in February and in June.
• One hybrid in Kona, Hawaii! Going back to normal :)

The plan is to complete the draft on C++23, fix issues reported by National Bodies, and then send it to the publication in the Spring of next year. We can expect C++23 to be officially announced around Autumn 2023.

Here are some notes from the meeting:

The next meeting will be held in Issaquah, WA, USA, starting from 6th February.

See the complete list of meetings: Upcoming Meetings, Past Meetings : Standard C++

Compilers  

Compiler vendors and library teams have a lot of work to catch up with the C++ standards.

Let’s look at three major compilers: MSVC, GCC, and Clang.

Visual Studio  

The MSVC team has rewritten their compiler infrastructure, and they can relatively quickly push new features. They even announced the C++20 support twice!

MSVC’s STL Completes /std:c++20 - C++ Team Blog

This announcement was mainly due to some additional changes and DR Standard fixes for <format>, <chrono>, and <ranges>. Once they were completed, the implementation is now stable again.

Some other MSVC news and blogs articles:

And here’s a documentation page about the conformance with C++ Standards (including C++20): Microsoft C++ language conformance table

Additionally, you can track the progress of the Standard Library implementation on Github: Changelog · Microsoft/STL Wiki.

GCC  

Current stable version GCC 12.2 from August GCC 12 Release Series.

You can also see the preview of the upcoming GCC 13: GCC 13 Release Series — Changes, New Features, and Fixes - GNU Project.

Language and the Library support notes:

And some news about GCC:

Clang  

Current stable version: 15.0.6 from late November, Welcome to Clang’s documentation! — Clang 15.0.0 documentation.

And also, you can preview Clang 16: Clang 16.0.0git (In-Progress) Release Notes — Clang 16.0.0git documentation.

Debugging performance  

Let’s expand the topic on performance and the feedback loops:

Here’s the article by Vitorio Romeo: the sad state of debug performance in c++ - and fixed in Improving the State of Debug Performance in C++ - C++ Team Blog

In short, thanks to the msvc::intrinsic attribute, the team managed to annotate a couple of move-related functions, and in some cases, the code generation yields 226 instructions in 17.4 while 17.5 gives only 106! From release notes: std::move, std::forward, std::move_if_noexcept, and std::forward_like will now not produce function calls in generated code, even in debug mode. This is to avoid named casts causing unnecessary overhead in debug builds. /permissive- or a flag that implies it (e.g. /std:c++20 or std:c++latest) is required.

Additionally, we have two bugs reported by Vittorio: 104719 – Use of `std::move` in libstdc++ leads to worsened debug performance and Use of `std::move` in libc++ leads to worsened debug performance · Issue #53689 · llvm/llvm-project - they seems to be fixed in GCC and Clang, and they can now fold simple instructions.

Overall, there’s a lot to do on the debugging side of C++, but as you can see, the community works well, tries to listen to the needs, and vendors improve their implementations.

C++ successor languages & Security  

The ISO C++ process may be slow in some cases and inefficient. Plus, there are lots of “holy” wars in the committee, especially about things like “no breaking ABI”. In some cases, we know several issues in the Standard, and we know how to fix them… but because we cannot break ABI, nothing can be done (apart from adding some hacky workaround). Some groups, for example, from the Google team, were a bit discouraged by this fact and created some new approaches to C++.

There’s a great article: The Year of C++ Successor Languages By Lucian Radu Teodorescu, where you can read about approaches and short descriptions for each language.

In the article, we can read that despite being criticized (a lot!), C++ has consistently been in the top 4 programming languages for the past 30 years. Critics argue that the language is too large and complex, with features that should be removed and with too many and not enough features at the same time. These criticisms have led to the creation of several programming languages that aim to succeed C++ as the dominant system programming language. In 2022, three languages were announced at major C++ conferences: Val, Carbon, and CppFront. This article provides a critical perspective on these languages and their potential as C++ successors.

Val

Announced and led by Dave Abrahams and Dimitri Racordon, heavily influenced by Swift, seems coherent and easy to use.

See https://www.val-lang.dev/

Carbon

Backed by Google (and, according to Chandler, also by Adobe), “feels like a C++ cleanup project.”

See carbon-language @Github

and more links:

CppFront/Cpp2

Led by Herb Sutter, is an attempt to have a better syntax and better defaults… but still compile to C++.

My view

It’s always good to have competition. C++ might benefit from other languages and exchange features from Carbon or Rust.

What’s more Security “theme” seems to be visible this year, and we have reports like:

ChatGPT  

I asked the bot, but it didn’t tell me if it was written in C++. I guess some parts could be done in C++, but since it’s a vast system, many technologies might be used there.

In a C++Weekly video: C++ Weekly - Ep 354 - Can AI And ChatGPT Replace C++ Programmers? - YouTube, Jason Turner experiments with the bot. Sometimes, it creates valid responses, but you still have to pay attention to details. This chatbot can be a really helpful coding assistant.

I also read an excellent email from Fahim ul Haq founder of Educative:

AI like ChatGPT will change the landscape of software development — but not in the way that many fear. As a software engineer and developer learning advocate, I believe ChatGPT can help us make better software, but it can’t replace developer jobs.

Fahim also suggests the following ideas about the chatbot:

“ChatGPT is going to make coding more productive and bug-free. As it accommodates more complex requirements, we can look forward to it helping eliminate grunt work and accelerate productivity and testing. "

As assistants such as ChatGPT evolve, many of the tedious tasks that have occupied developers could go away in the next decade, including: automating unit tests, generating test cases based on parameters, analyzing code to suggest security best practices, and automating QA .

Not to mention the learning and teaching capabilities. Imagine a friendly “tutor bot for C++”. You can learn a programming language or ask about any language feature just like you ask your expert colleague at work.

I think we’ll see lots of inspiring tools in the next year…. maybe even something strictly for C++; who knows :)

Conferences & Online Events  

Look at this link to ISO C++ page with all registered conferences worldwide: Conferences Worldwide, C++FAQ.

Some highlights, resources, and keynote videos:

Meeting C++ Online  

I’m impressed with Jens Weller, who created a global online meetup:

Meeting C++ online (Düsseldorf, Deutschland) | Meetup

For example, have a look at some recent AMAs:

Books  

A few selected books that arrived in 2022 (or late 2021):

Disclaimer: Links in the table are affiliate links to Amazon.

See my review of “Embracing Modern C++”: Embracing Modern C++ Safely, Book Review - C++ Stories

And there’s also my book: “C++ Initialization Story”, released in mid 2022 and completed in December:

C++ Initialization Story @Leanpub

Get C++ Initialization Story only for 9.99$ (not 15.99$), only till 1st January

Popularity  

C++ seems to have stable growth in various programming languages’ “popularity” charts this year.

Have a look:

The image is based on data from Stack Overflow survey and Tiobe Index.

According to Github, Octoverse C++ is in 6th position (last year it was in the 7th place); see here.

What’s more, there was also an interesting article from early November: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry

From the article:

Anthony Peacock, formerly a quant at both Citi and Citadel said “it’s impossible to find people with a really high level of C++ skills, which is exactly what every trading company wants.”

Even if Carbon, Rust or CppFront is just around the corner… (or not)… there will be still a ton of C++ code to maintain. What’s more, lots of areas like finance will still use C++ for their low-level infrastructure.

Here’s the related discussion at Reddit: The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry : cpp with over 350 comments!

Your Input & Survey  

On 12th December, I started my annual survey about the use of C++ in the last year. I got 649 votes. Thank you!

Let’s make some summaries and tables from your answers :)

C++ Standard Used

On a daily basis, which C++ Standard do you use?

Answer	2022	2021	2020	2019	2018
Pre C++11	10.8%	7.5%	8.4%	10.3%	20%
C++11	27.6%	25.6%	25.5%	30.3%	41%
C++14	28.7%	28%	28.6%	35%	42%
C++17	61.8%	66.1%	64.4%	62.4%	44%
C++20	42.2%	28.8%	20.4%	9.2%	n/a

(The numbers for the above do not sum to 100%)

C++20 gets much more uses, while C++11/14 stabilizes at around 28%.

Experience with C++17

What’s your experience with C++17?

Answer	2022	2021	2020	2019
experimenting with C++17	29.7%	28.9%	34.9%	39.4%
only read basic information	10.2%	11.4%	9.4%	13.4%
already using in production	57.6%	56.6%	52.2%	41.6%
don’t know any of its feature	1.8%	<1%	1.6%	2.6%

Experience with C++20

What’s your experience with C++20?

Answer	2022	2021	2020	2019
experimenting with C++20	37.8%	35.7%	35.6%	29.3%
only read basic information	36.2%	44.1%	50.8%	59.8%
already using in production	17.6%	12.8%	6.8%	n/a
don’t know any of its feature	7.7%	6%	5.2%	9.1%

Compilers Used

What compiler do you use?

Answer	2022	2021	2020	2019
GCC	70.9%	76%	70.3%	75.6%
Clang	46.1%	51.8%	49.6%	58.7%
MSVC	54.7%	54.1%	58.5%	56.3%
Intel Compiler	2.5%	2.3%	2.8%	3.1%
C++ Builder	1.1%	2.2%	3%	1.2%

(The numbers for the above do not sum to 100%)

What IDE do you use for C++ projects

Answer	2022	2021
Visual Studio	48.2%	48.8%
Visual Studio Code	49.3%	47.1%
CLion	19.3%	18.5%
C++ Builder IDE	1.5%	2%
Eclipse	6.2%	5.8%
Vim/Emacs	24%	26.9%
QT Creator	14.6%	15.7%
Notepad++	9.1%	7.4%
XCode	6.8%	6.1%

Answer	2022	2021	2020	2019
Debugger	74.3%	80.8%	77%	83.6%
Sanitizers	36.8%	38.9%	31.9%	40.4%
Static Code Analysis	57.2%	58.7%	60.9%	55.7%
Profilers	43%	49.1%	53.4%	56.8%
Clang Format	45%	49.4%	43.3%	49.3%
CMake	64.9%	67.3%	62.3%	66%
Package Managers	25.3%	26.2%	23.2%	21.4%

(The numbers for the above do not sum to 100%)

Best thing that happened in 2022:

Answers from this open question, based on popularity (I tried to group similar things), no special order:

• C++ language updates and standards: You mentioned updates to the C++ language, such as the release of C++20 and C++23, as well as the adoption of new features and proposals.
• New languages: Carbon / Cpp2 / Val, and triggering the discussion on the next steps in the community.
• Conferences and events: as usual, conferences such as CppCon and Meeting C++ got many votes.
• Books and resources: “A Tour of C++”, “Embracing Modern C++ Safely,” and “Klaus Iglberger’s book on Software Design” were quite popular among the answers.
• YouTube channels: especially Jason’s Turner, Cppcon Channel YouTube, or Meeting C++ Youtube
• Personal projects and learning: Many of you mentioned working on personal projects or learning more about C++ to improve your skills and understanding of the language.
• Compiler support: the availability of compiler support for new C++ standards as an essential development in the C++ community.
• C++’s popularity: responses mentioned TIOBE and other rankings

Additionally, it’s great to hear such news like

• “Move in my company to C++20”
• “personal upgrade from c++14 to c++20”
• “I just got a job in C++ again and I’m quite happy with it”

Or: “We are still alive ;-)” :)

There were also many positive opinions about the blog, my books and the newsletter! Thank you!

I’m getting to enjoy your C++ Initialization book

I found your c++ stories blog. It was quite useful for my interview preparations

Other surveys:

My survey is not the most important :) Have a look at other larger surveys run by those companies:

Summary  

Thanks for reading up to this moment :)

C++ is at a crossroads today: on one side, it’s in really good shape, with lots of new features, compiler support, and cool tools (even better-debugging performance!). But at the same time, many experts struggle to make language inherently safer and fix some long-standing issues ( breaking ABI discussion). That’s why some experts try to start from something fresh and improve C++ by creating a new competition. Those new languages directly compile to C++ (as CppFront), or have robust interoperability with C++ (like Carbon). So maybe in the future, you’ll be writing in a super safe C++2 language and still have some legacy files in good old modern C++ in the same projects. I hope “friendly competition” will push C++ to new directories and get us better features and safer code.

What’s more ChatGPT merges, so who know if we’ll still be coding next year :)

To summarize, my big things for 2022:

• C++20 adoption
• C++23 ongoing
• New languages and new opportunities to push C++ further
• Community discussions and feedback loops

Best wishes!

Promos:

Your Turn

• What do you think about C++ in 2022?
• What was the most crucial event/news for you?
• Did I miss something?

Join the discussion below the article.

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