This was my first committee meeting. I arrived Sunday morning at Jona, the next town over where I had a lovely AirBnB in a very nice, peaceful suburb. I settled to visit Rapperswil but met some people from Nvidia going to the meeting. So we naturally started to talk about C++. The meeting was to last 6 days and until the very end, we talked about C++, every minute of every hour. Read more

The papers that will be discussed at the next C++ committee meeting are out. The listing contains a number of interesting and controversial papers. Among them, Herbceptions, a number of concurrent concurrency proposals, a proposal calling for major design changes in the coroutines TS, And an easy-to-review, 200 pages long proposal to unify the Range TS in the std namespace. In total, there are about 140 papers all rather interesting. Read more

In C++11, attributes were added as a way to standardized features such as gnu __attribute__and msvc’s __declspec. The language provisions for standard attributes as well as non-standard attributes through the use of namespaces, though the behavior of non-standard attributes was only settled for C++17. And sadly, as of 2018, neither GCC nor MSVC offer their vendor-specific attributes though the portable C++ standard syntax. Most standard attributes were added in C++14 and 17. Read more

You may have noticed a number of “What should go in the Standard Library” posts over the last few days. These posts have generated quite a bit of comments on Reddit and discussions on Slack. I hope more people chime in. The conclusion is that we pretty much all agree to disagree on what the STL is or should be. I’m not sure we can even agree on what C++ is. Read more

This is a reply to Guy Davidson’s article “Batteries not included: what should go in the C++ standard library?”. Over the past few years there has been a push to include a graphics library into the C++ standard. It would be something a bit like cairo. Or SDL. The proposal, in its current form, is here In its current state, the library proposal can draw some shapes on a pre-allocated surface, has some support for images, and there are of courses projects to add text, maybe some input in the form of mouse / keyboard handling. Read more

I wrote a series of article where I compile simple Windows and OSX applications from Linux. I hope you enjoyed it. For me, it certainly was quite the journey. Or the beginning of one. There is lot of rooms for improvement and we left some area unexplored, including some other major Operating systems like Android and iOS. I also did not talk about debugging. The open source community is amazing. We should not take projects like llvm, wine, darling, or even osxcross for granted. Read more