Seems they're not quite done nailing legs to C++. I suppose it will run faster, but "easily understandable by anyone with half a dozen brains" is my take.
[Confession: I once caused the Bell Labs 'cfront' tape to be ordered, and loaded into unsuspecting Vaxen innocently running BSD Unix, at an otherwise reputable school. I allege, in my defense, that I mostly used it only as "a better C" (back then, C did not have function prototypes); and that, at the time, no other grad students were noticeably (further) deranged by the availability of C++.]
Well... I'd say C++ even with these latest improvements is much easier to grasp than Haskell, for example. The question is if the steep learning curve can be justified.
I'd say that for some it makes sense. Updated C++ will be a fairly high-level language with absolute access to bare metal and near 100% compatibility with C, that's very unique. And the world is in a desperate need for a deterministic (i.e. optionally garbage-collected) bare-metal replacement for C for systems programming. D could be it, but Walter just won't let the community to have some control of it.
Moreover, I suspect some of these improvements around the type system will allow C++ compilers to generate faster code than C compiler could ever achieve because programmer's intentions will be better expressed.
I only wish they expanded the standard library more. As far as I'm concerned, C++ doesn't really have a standard lib: STL is often awkward to use and very limited, for instance std::string is next to useless and iostream is such a pain... Then we have Boost, it comes with insane build times, incomprehensible compile error messages and multi-platform issues, so most C++ programs mostly fall back to C lib for basics like I/O, or to platform-dependent frameworks like MFC.
I also hope that external templates will work as promised. In the current form, templatized C++ works well only in a form of one giant file where everything is included in the correct order. Perhaps this is why every single C++ project in my relatively long C++ career has been using the language in "C with classes" form despite my best attempts to convince people that templates aren't always evil.
True, but it's become a specialist need - like construction machinery and heavy trucks. I wrote some C++ a few years ago (objects, STL, etc.) in a case where it had been chosen mostly out of inertia - Python could have been used with similar performance and less code (and did get used afterwards for other cases).
Speaking of Python and C++: possibly some of us would wish to write Python and get C++. Mark Dufour has been persistently plugging away at a Python-to-C++ compiler (and welcomes help): http://shed-skin.blogspot.com/
If you avoid web programming and SQL-heavy enterprise development C++ is very much mainstream and wouldn't call it a specialist need. Actually, the kind of open source projects I enjoy to tinker with [when not at work] is all C/C++: Qt, Webkit, SQLite, various compilers and interpreters, search engines, etc.
Excellent taste in tinkering, but ... ahem ... aren't those a tad on the infrastructure side ? ("Is this the right room for an argument ?", or are you setting a subtle trap ? ;-)
I don't doubt that most of the (non-idle, non-phone/TV/etc.) CPU cycles in the world are probably being burned by executing code written in C/C++. But the stuff in my shopping bag probably also did better than 90% of its movement by truck/train/ship.
P.S. Mark Dufour's ShedSkin may have you covered for 100x of that 200x speed hit you mentioned in another thread: http://www.hxa.name/minilight/#comparison is instructive (one small case, restricted, etc. Void where prohibited by law).
[Confession: I once caused the Bell Labs 'cfront' tape to be ordered, and loaded into unsuspecting Vaxen innocently running BSD Unix, at an otherwise reputable school. I allege, in my defense, that I mostly used it only as "a better C" (back then, C did not have function prototypes); and that, at the time, no other grad students were noticeably (further) deranged by the availability of C++.]