KDE Plasma 5.26 Eyes Using C++20 Features

KDE developers are looking at possibly making use of C++20 language features within the Plasma 5.26 desktop and the newer C++ usage could work its way to other KDE components with time too.

Relayed this week was KDE developer Nicolas Fella proposing C++20 usage for Plasma 5.26. In particular, the C++ co-routines support is one of the features of C++20 he's wanting to make use of in the next major Plasma release.

Elevating the C++ requirements to C++20 would mean bumping the KDE compiler requirements to GCC 10 or Clang 11. Thus the mailing list announcement in seeing if requiring GCC 10 / Clang 11 for building Plasma 5.26+ would break the workflow for any users or packagers.

The KDE Plasma desktop is eyeing C++20 to enjoy coroutines and other modern language features.

Plasma 5.26 is aiming for release in mid-October and the GCC 10 / Clang 11 releases have been out as stable for two years already. So far based on the comments raised thus far it seems like a reasonable bet for C++20 usage.

There are merge requests already pending that would begin to replace various custom code with standardized C++ coroutines if C++20 usage is permitted for this next KDE Plasma release.