New Features for your favourite C++ Compiler

Herb Sutter has a post up on Sutters Mill asking what people would like to see added to their favourite C++ Compiler. Unsurprisingly, Conformance has so far come out at the top. This is literally nothing more than adding all of the features in the C++ Specification (C++11 mostly, but I'm sure that there are compilers out there that have missing features from older versions) that haven't been implemented yet. What I found surprising was that Performance is second place.

On modern hardware, unless you are doing realtime or embedded programming, do you really need your compiler to be able to make your code run that much faster? And by "that much faster", the entry for Performance I was to increase the speed by 5%. That's not a lot, and if you are writing native code to run on modern hardware, and that 5% speed improvement is that important then I have to wonder what you are doing.

I honestly expected that Safety would come out higher than Performance. Safety in this sense is split into two cases - STL Safety and Language Safety. STL Safety is making it so that actions on STL components are thread- and bounds-safe with minimal overhead,and Language Safety is the same but for non STL components. It's true that a lot of this is considered unnecessary because you should know what your program is doing, and it shouldn't be doing any unsafe actions, but we all know that this isn't always the case, and having compiler guards that catch these things with minimal overhead would make a lot of our programs a lot safer to run. I personally think this is a lot more important than making the programs run that little bit faster.

For the record, my last vote went to adding some more Reflection capabilities into the language. Certainly not to the level of languages like Groovy or Ruby, where you can totally re-write the interfaces of objects at runtime (That scares me), but being able to introspect types at runtime, and instantiate them by name, and things like that can be very useful on occasion and right now just can't be done in C++ without a lot of nasty hacks.