Show HN: C++ Compiler Support Page

Hi, the live search is for developers that want to quickly look up the support for a particular feature. The "missing features" feature and filtering by compiler versions is something I'm currently working on. Any suggestions are welcome, and thanks for your feedback.

Hi, I first designed this site as a way for C++ developers to quickly look up support for particular features (as you've described, in isolation). But in the long run, I think we can extract much more meaning out of these numbers, which is why I added the conformance overview as a first test candidate.

As for feature names: I agree that the paper titles tend to be very technical / niche. However, I didn't want to distort them and rename them, since the site is targeted at the in-the-know population you've mentioned. Do you have an idea how this could be improved?

Regarding the search: This is something I'm working on improving, so that coarse searches like "constexp sharedptr" would correctly yield the constexpr std::shared_ptr proposal.

Hi, I got the initial information from the cppreference compiler support site, then verified with each compiler vendors support tables and updated the information accordingly.

Then I wrote a bot that watches all known (and most importantly, reliable) sources for changes, that then notifies me. The data itself is kept in very simple yaml files. So whenever something changes, I verify and update the info accordingly (The site itself is then regenerated and uploaded automatically).

For features that are not fully implemented yet, or where the vendor does not provide any information (e.g. Apple's conformance table), I set up a conformance test suite on my machine that runs most of these across all toolchains.

Please note that I won't be the only person that maintains this site. I'm in the process of open-sourcing and automating most of it, so that everyone can contribute via GitHub. It's just that keeping up with C++ is part of my job, and also a personal interest of mine. So I do this as a "labour of love".

C++ was and is reasonably popular, even when all new projects start using rust I guess there will be demand due to all the legacy code that cannot be rewritten. On the other hand you will be working with legacy C++, from what I heard its like selling your soul for job security.

Plenty, because despite the noise around the alternatives, even those alternatives are built with help of GCC and LLVM, written in C++ and aren't getting any rewrite short term.

Then there are whole industries where only C, C++ and Assembly matter, including standards, so it will take a while for new contenders to be taken seriously on such industries.

If you care about job security and salary, I recommend specializing in maintaining COBOL legacy codebases for the financial services sector.

There are not enough oldtimers alive to do it, and the younger guys refuse to learn it. That drove up the hourly salaries enormously.

Hi, thanks. I agree, modules support is kind of there, but not really. I think we could only go by what the compiler vendors state, and add some notes about what's missing.

There are a handful of commercial offerings of C++ conformance test suites. They're all generally around 40000 euro for an evaluation copy (more for an actual full licensed copy), none are 100% complete, and we continually find bugs in tests.

You're not going to find some hobbyist coming up with a useful conformance or coverage test suite for free. It's intensive, expensive, and arduous.

Such things are mandatory, however, if you are a C++ vendor targeting ISO 26262 or IEC 61508 or similar -- basically, software that could kill you if it's done wrong. It's a niche with money and motivation.

Having something like WPT [1] for C++ would be really nice.

[1] https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt

Hi! That's certainly possible, and also what I'm already doing. However, it's very time-consuming to do it for every single feature. The compiler vendors already provide their feature-support tables for most features, which I've made a small bot for that watches for conformance changes. For feature support that is unclear or not provided by the vendors, I write conformance tests to verify. In my experience, this mix works best.

Hi, yes, it's just because I'm still trying out some design ideas and am polishing the code. I'm already in the process of open-sourcing it, so that everyone can contribute via GitHub PRs, it's just preparation work that has to be done.

Thank you very much, I also plan to add more information to the information section of each feature, so that people have the option to TL;DR instead of heading over to the proposals.

Thanks! I agree to an extent, but it's also the beast the industry married. So as long as it's around, we might as well "deal with it". This page is hopefully one tool that helps with that :)

You have to acknowledge that every feature in C++ (including the most insane ones) are well justified with real-life use cases in the industry. It is what it is. People who don't like it are using Go/Rust where it makes sense.