Clang 20 was released in early March. But there is no rest for the wicked; Clang 21 is poised for a release in September. While we are hard at work on C++23, C++26, and C23 features, I am also trying to find some time to work on miscellaneous bits and bobs. I figured I should talk about some of them even if it’s all listed in the in-progress changelog, which we do our best to keep as accurate as possible. Read more

Someone was giving away stickers reading “Somebody Should Do Something” at the WG21 C++ Standardization meeting held in Wrocław last week, and it makes for a pretty good tagline for that meeting. We are one meeting away from calling C++26 feature complete. The draft will be sent to National Bodies this summer. After that, we will have a couple of meetings to fix bugs and then wait for ISO to publish the official standard, which might take a year or two. Read more

How would you put a 69 meters long, 50 meters tall, 1210 tonnes ship in a museum? A boat so large and so great it sank 100 meters into her maiden voyage? Well, you can’t. But, if you really wanted to build a monument to hubris, unsound engineering requirements, and design by kingship, you could design and build a museum around the Vasa. Entombed in concrete, the Vasa will never sail again Read more

Earlier this month, the C++ committee meeting had its penultimate meeting of the C++23 cycle. It was also the first in-person meeting of the C++23 cycle. This means that C++23 was mostly designed over zoom. Which, sadly, explains in part why the language side of things has been rather stagnant these past couple of years. But a lot of things happened in Kona. I forgot how intense these things were. Read more

C++ is not done yet. Read more

DISCLAIMER The following represent my opinions, not that of the C++ committee (WG21), any of its members or any other person mentioned in this article. I think the most fundamental work done by WG21 is trying to answer meta-questions about itself. What is C++, what is its essence, what should we focus on? How to evolve a language with a growing community, a growing committee? A language that is deployed on billions of devices, with an estimated 50 billions actively maintained lines of code. Read more