Andrei Alexandrescu gave the keynote speech at Boostcon 2009. The speech’s title was “Iterators Must Go.” I did not have the opportunity to attend this year’s Boostcon, but the slides of the keynote are available online.
The talk is an interesting look at the nature of iterators in C++, their shortcommings, and a proposal for how to fix the problems via a replacement of iterators with “ranges.” Ranges provide a range checked memory safe approach to iterating over elements in a container. There is a discussion of the usage of ranges in C++ on the D mailing list. While the concept is interesting, what was more interesting to me are the last couple of slides where Alexandrescu states that D’s standard library already supports this “range” notion. He also states that he is working on a book, “The D Programming Language,” that is due to be published soon.
Perhaps if I had been paying attention I would have already known that Alexandrescu was involved in the development of D. Personally, I had not taken D seriously before. I did not see any compelling advantages to using it. However, now that I know Alexandrescu has been working on the language and seems to be endorsing it, I will have to take it more seriously. For those who do not know, Alexandrescu quite literally wrote the book on Modern C++ Design
