C++ in 2005: Can It Become A Java Beater?

<!-- begin story summary --> C++ in 2005: Can It Become A Java Beater? (Technology) By Carnage4Life Wed Mar 7th, 2001 at 10:56:16 PM EST   Recently in an interview with Linux World Bjarne Stroustrup described his concerns for the C++ language as well as a wish list of libraries he would like added to the standard when it is next up for review in 2005. The following article is an analysis of Bjarne's wishlist as it relates to C++ regaining the ground it has lost due to Java's emerging popularity on the server. I'll also discuss a few libraries I'd like to see added that were not discussed by Bjarne. NOTE: Bjarne Stroustrup does not mention Java in this interview, Java vs. C++ is simply the direction I have decided to take the results of the interview so that there is something to compare the wishlist against.   <!-- end story summary --><!-- begin story body --> Concurrency Bjarne: I'd like to see a library supporting threads and a related library supporting concurrency without shared memory. Multithreaded programming is very important because it allows for unique advantages including exploiting parallelism on machines with multiple processors, making programs appear faster by parallelizing disk bound I/O and allowing for better modularization of code. Currently C++ developers who want to use threads in a standard compliant manner must use the PThreads library which uses the Mutual Exclusion model to handle concurrency. Mutual Exclusion primarily involves using Mutex variables and Condition variables to handle thread synchronization and access to shared data. The main problem with using PThreads in C++ is that the POSIX thread standard is not designed for object oriented programming and one constantly slams into limitations such as being unable to specifically thread objects which hamper design decisions. There are a few alternatives to using PThreads if standards compliance is not important. RogueWave Software has what is probably the most popular C++ threads library called Threads.h++ 2.0. There are also The Adaptive Communi