What's wrong with const?

Question

What are the known shortfalls of const in C++ and C++0x?

Answer 1

The two main issues that I have seen frequent complaints about in newsgroups, are

• The need to waste a lot of time on supporting non-const-aware APIs (especially Microsoft's).

• The need to define both const and non-const version of a method.

I think the latter could/should be supported by the language.

Possibly in conjunction with support for covariant member function implementations, because both need some way to pick up the type of the this pointer.

A third issue is that

• const does not propagate to owned objects.

Cheers & hth.,