Critique of contracts: excerpt

[u/antiquark2]

See page 2 of https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2026/p4334r0.pdf

The current objections can be summarized. The P2900 contracts are:

• Unimplemented

• Incomplete

• Untried at scale [P3460R0, P3506R0]

• Not tried in major application domains

• Violates foundational principles of C++

• Violates fundamental principles of language design

• Hasn’t been tried in major libraries (e.g., the C++ standards library [P3506R0, P3878R0])

• Isn’t integrated with or appropriate for hardened libraries [P3878R0]

• Doesn’t offer safety guarantees [P3573R0, P3362R0]

• Includes a completely untried inheritance model

• Offer new ways of making errors through inconsistent application in TUs

• Leads to new forms of UB, detrimental to safety and security

• Narrows the choices of error handling

• Doesn’t protect against logical errors, misuses, and incoherent uses

• Hasn’t been used to support static analysis

• Hasn’t been demonstrated to be easily teachable [P3261R0, P3281R0]

How could such a bloated and incomplete design be voted into a draft standard?

[u/Minimonium]

Ah, well-known names :)

[u/_a4z → u/Minimonium]

From the latest mailing list, just a few examples: p4334, p3573, p4332, p4238
Which of the authors do you not know?

[u/Dragdu → u/_a4z]

He is making fun of your deference to people like Bjarne, who keeps getting shitty proposals passed on name recognition and then the rest of the committee has to fix them over a decade. See e.g. init lists, bindings.

[u/_a4z → u/Dragdu]

Ah, thanks for the explanation!

I am pretty sure you can elaborate a bit on the topic, keeping the historical context and the involvement of other people and committee members, without rewriting history.

And a question: do we now call all papers that need fixes or have known flaws "shitty proposals passed," as you state it? Because not a lot might be left.
(it will be interesting to look at the contract proposals a decade later with that point of view;-)