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The C++ Teaching Manifesto

This document exists in multiple languages - thanks to the translators !

Teaching C++ is a hard task, for students as well as for teachers. This manifesto intends to ensure that this task is not made unintentionally harder for both parties, by providing up-to-date best practices for teaching.

1. I will teach C++ as a high-level language.

  • Too many courses take the approach of presenting C++ on the same level of abstraction than C. This is severely misguided.
    • C++ programs are written against the C++ abstract machine, not your classroom's CPUs, and compilers will optimize code with the assumptions of the abstract machine in mind.
    • C++ allows for arbitrarily high levels of abstractions, with generally no runtime penalty for optimized code, if either inlining or LTO are leveraged.
    • Expressive C++ Coding Challenge Results

2. I will teach the core concepts and values of C++

  • Value semantics.
    • Especially over object semantics of languages such as Java / C#.
    • Prefer automatic storage to dynamic storage (stack variables over new / shared_ptr / unique_ptr whenever possible).
  • Const-correctness.
  • Ownership and RAII, resource management.
  • Zero-cost abstractions.
  • Generic programming and how to leverage the type system to provide maximal compile-time guarantees on your program.
    • In particular, not doing at run-time what can be done at compile time.

3. I will refer to and keep up-to-date with current best practices

4. I will not teach using outdated revisions of the C++ standard.

  • ISO rules mandata that the only valid standard at a given point in time is the last one. We don't build new houses with electric plugs from 50 years ago.
  • C++ has a three years release cadence : by the time the students are on the job market, what was considered avant-garde during their classes will be mainstream.
  • It is not necessary to use non-released standards, but it can be interesting to at least look at them - that's the standards which will be in effect when the students are out of school !

5. I will not use outdated tooling to teach my students

  • Windows : use msys2 with the latest clang, gcc, or an MSVC recent enough to support motion 4.
  • Ubuntu or Debian : if a recent distribution is not available, use the packages from https://apt.llvm.org/
  • Mac : use a recent macOS with the latest Xcode, or install the latest gcc or llvm from Homebrew if macOS cannot be upgraded.

6. I will not teach C++ as an object-oriented language

  • Because it is not. By the own word of its creator, it is a multi-paradigm language.
  • Fun fact : C++ is a fairly advanced functional language, thanks to type-level computations and some level of dependent typing (non-type template parameters).
  • C++ can be leveraged to study almost the whole history of programming, so let's leverage that and provide nice examples to our students.

7. I will not teach dialectal or platform-specific C++

  • No "C/C++" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk
  • No C-with-classes : just teach C or Java if you really want to do that.
  • No "Java/C++". Hint : if you are writing new std::string, there is something wrong.
  • No -fno-exceptions : exceptions are a core part of C++. They give all their meaning to RAII, and except on 32-bit Windows are faster on the happy path than error codes.
    • It's easier to learn to not use exceptions if you already know them, than to learn to use exceptions if you don't.
  • No conio.h / iostream.h / graphics.h / whatever DOS-era API you can find.

8. I will not teach outdated software development patterns

  • Multiple classical development patterns were over the years integrated in various programming language, either as language or library features.
  • Closed polymorphism : visitor pattern -> now can be done with std::variant
  • Strategy pattern : std::function

9. I will not teach volatile as a multithread synchronization mechanism

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