C++ 11 is now available in both gcc and clang. That mean it is really available where it matters.

Using C++ 11 in your project (with autoconf).

First if you use autoconf, you have to detect it. The autoconf archive has a macro. Download the .m4 definition and put it in your m4 directory in your project.

In the configure.ac, add the following line:

AX_CXX_COMPILE_STDCXX_11(noext,mandatory)

Make sure it appears after

AC_GNU_SOURCE

This is will make configure detect C++11 support, without GNU extension (I tend to avoid these in general) and fail if it doesn't exist. If you prefer to make it optional, read the above documentation that has more details.

The interesting features

I'm interested in several features from C++11.

  1. auto to automatically deduct the type where it can. Ever gotten annoyed by the long type name for iterators of containers? Just use auto instead.
  2. Lambda: now you can write lambda functions like in Python or JavaScript. This is overly convenient when you iterate over containers or use std::for_each().
  3. The smart pointers: I was using the one from Boost, then the one from std::tr1::. Just replace with std::
  4. std::bind and std::function to replace Boost own versions.

There are more, I'll talk about it when I get to look at them.