Google Wants To Make C++ More Fun

Following the recent Phoronix article about an LLVM/Clang server (ClangD), here's some slides from a talk by a Google engineer about re-factoring C++ to make it more fun for developers.

The "Refactoring C++ with Clang" talk was presented at the LLVM European Conference earlier this year by Google's Manuel Klimek. When it comes to Google's needs, C++ meets their requirements for performance and productivity, but it's not always fun.

Their plans to make it more fun come down to better tooling support integrated into Clang / libclang for providing correct indentation, automatically fixing style violations, renaming variables, creating code structure, etc. With better tools, editor integration, new libraries, and IDE'ish services they think they can improve things for C++ development. Common code transformations would be autonomous and integrated while being fast and correct. The IDE integration could be with emacs or vi, the command-line itself, or hooked into other integrated development environments like Eclipse.

Their libraries are "in progress" as of April, the tools are coming in early spikes, ClangD is entering design phases, and editor integration is still to be done.

Those interested in learning more about the "Refactoring C++ with Clang" can see the PDF slides and the MOV video. Be sure to have also read the An LLVM/Clang Server Proposed article which is the latest (RFC) update on the ClangD/server side.