While I appreciate the effort to make things easier, as someone who is trying to move from C++98 to C++11, I'm not sure the new features make the language easier to use so long as you still have to learn the old ways of doing things. Speaking for myself, at least, this just causes interference between competing habits. What would be better for me and maybe others, would be if some of the unsafe or deprecated features in C++ were disallowed or if there were a compiler option to disallow them. I know this would break C89 compatibility but so what if you know you only care about the newer and more efficient features of C++?
If you can, go for C++14 directly, it offers improvements over C++11.
Language features that ease your daily working with C++11/14:
- Lambdas, especially when working with <algorithm>
- ranged for loop
- auto instead of typing long types
- variadic templates increase compilation speed over the previous macro based simulation of this feature.
- the basic support for multithreading which std::thread & co offer.
And also, as always in C++: you only pay for what you use. You still can write code in old styles pretty well with C++14, same will be true for coming standards.
Agreed. Auto looks like a useless bit of syntatic sugar, but it can make working with the standard library (and its impenetrable iterator classes) a whole lot simpler. On top of that, boost has some nice features that make easy-but-annoying tasks like walking a file system and parsing program options easy.
If your last exposure to C++ featured nothing but raw pointers, you should really give it a second look.
