In the preface to his book Modern C++, Andrei Alexandrescu paints a vision of what programming should be like:

“Imagine the following scenario. You come from a design meeting with a couple of printed diagrams, scribbled with your annotations. Okay, the event type passed between these objects is not char anymore; it’s int. You change one line of code. The smart pointers to Widget are too slow; they should go unchecked. You change one line of code. The object factory needs to support the new Gadget class just added by another department. You change one line of code.

You have changed the design. Compile. Link. Done.”

This is a very nice theory. But as C++ programming has remained relevant only among a small (yet important) “fringe” of developers, they have been flexing the standards toward an uncompromising pursuit of this vision. The results are somewhat extreme and not generally easy to work with.

In this article I will talk briefly about the what is happening and what I think of the aesthetics.

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