This week we chat with Vittorio Romeo about the pros and cons of backwards compatibility in C++, and his proposal to get the best of both worlds: Epochs.

As well as language compatibility, we also discuss ABI compatibility - why breaking these things is such a problem, but how not breaking them is increasingly becoming a problem.

We also, finally, get an answer to the age of question of, "how many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?"

Links:

• Vittorio's CppCon talk on epochs
• p1881 - The Epochs Proposal- Epochs: a backward-compatible language evolution mechanism
• p1863 - ABI Break- Titus Winters' paper on the ABI compatibility issue
• SPECS- A Modest Proposal: C++ Resyntaxed