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CppCon 2017: Titus Winters “C++ as a "Live at Head" Language”

CppCon · talk · Watch on YouTube

Software architecture & designC, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesTesting, debugging & developer tools

What it is

Titus Winters' CppCon 2017 talk argues for C++ and Google's Abseil to be maintained as a live at head language, relying on testing and automated tooling rather than never changing or promising no compatibility. It covers Hyrum's law and the limits of semantic versioning.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Recommended whenever versioning, semver, monorepos and backward compatibility are debated, for its nuanced treatment of dependencies.

  • 7 people recommended it
  • 7 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2017, last 2022

What HN commenters said

  1. “There is a great talk by their C++ dev team”

    Google C++ team on building from source in a monorepo

    nsm, 2017-12 · Recommendation · in “Why Google stores billions of lines of code in a single repository (2016)”

  2. “Relevant talk by Google at CppCon last year focused on C++, but really talks about getting rid of versioning in general.”

    Google talk on C++ and eliminating versioning

    ot, 2018-02 · Recommendation · in “Advantages of monolithic version control”

  3. “Here's a good related talk: C++ as a "Live at Head" language”

    Related talk on live at head approach from Google

    jacobparker, 2019-04 · Recommendation · in “Keeping master green at scale”

  4. “This talk is one of the better ones about this”

    Diamond dependency problem and semantic versioning limits

    kinjba11, 2019-10 · Recommendation · in “Why async fn in traits are hard”

  5. “at sufficient scale, there’s no such thing as a non-breaking change”

    Hyrum's law and testing to always take the latest dependency

    s3cur3, 2020-07 · Recommendation · in “Stop Abusing Semver”

  6. “a much more nuanced look at dependencies & versioning”

    Nuanced look at dependencies and versioning beyond semver

    klodolph, 2020-10 · Recommendation · in “Bazel Build System Support for LLVM”

  7. “I recommend this talk”

    Large-scale code changes via automation and backward-compatible increments

    ithkuil, 2020-11 · Recommendation · in “An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: live at head, semver, hyrum's law, monorepo, abseil, c++

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