We often hear “C++ is more complex than it needs to be,” typically demonstrated using anecdotes and “gotcha” examples. Those can be valid and demonstrate real pain points, but it would be nice to have more quantifiable data that we could analyze to measure sources of complexity. This talk reports work to systematically catalog and measure C++’s unneeded complexity, how some current evolution proposals may address its major sources, and presents specific suggestions on what we might be able to do about it in the context of a future-evolution proposal to simplify parameter passing and provide meaningful initialization guarantees in C++.
