CppFront is just like Carbon and Val, with a completly different syntax, translating to C++ is just an implementation detail, he just markets in a different way given his position at ISO, most likely not to raise too many waves.
Not really, we as a community know already that the best way to significantly change a language by keeping full compatibility is to write a preprocessor (CppFront way).
Carbon is DOA as it hacks a compiler, and Circle isn't even in active development (again if it would compile to C++ that would be a better direction).
At the same time putting ideas from Carbon to CppFront is possible (I wish Carbon developers would also think about going the preprocessing direction).
CppFront is just like Carbon and Val, CppFront compiling to C++ is an implementation detail, C++ and Objective-C aren't C, just as CppFront isn't C++, regardless of the sales pitch.
Herb is one of the best things that ever happened to C++. Not only is he wicked smart, but his ability to persuade is most impressive. As if he needed more, he's also a very nice gentleman.
CppFront compiles to C++ and everything is intended to map to clean usable C++ code so that if the project fails, the code is still salvageable in its C++ form.
I think you're removing all context and constructing a false equivalency
According to wikipedia, Eiffel was created in 1986, making it a contemporary with C++'s initial development. From what I can tell, it's creator had no affiliation with the development of C/C++, and it was created for reasons completely unrelated to C++.
CppFront was created by the C++ committee chairman for the explicit goal of providing a path forward for C++. Herb explicitly stated that the inspiration for using C++ as a compilation target was taken from Bjarne's initial implementation of C++, which compiled to C.
Nope, I am making a point that plenty of languages have as goal to compile to C++, Eiffel was only an example from many others I could have chosen from.
The way Herb Sutter tries to sell Cppfront, versus all those other languages that have backends capable of generating C++, is exactly that, as ISO C++ chairman he is trying to portray Cppfront isn't like the others, given his position.
Hasn't as it is, he would use the same terms as the Carbon and Val folks.
