Bulldozer00's Blog

Herb Sutter is by far the biggest cheerleader for the C++ programming language – even more so than the language’s soft spoken creator, Bjarne Stroustrup. Herb speaks with such enthusiasm and optimism that it’s infectious.

In his talk at the recently concluded GoingNative2013 C++ conference, Herb presented this slide to convey the structure of the ISO C++ Working Group 21 (WG21):

On the left, we have the language core and language evolution working groups. On the right, we have the standard library working group.

But wait! That was the organizational structure as of 18 months ago. As of now, we have this decomposition:

As you can see, there’s a lot of volunteer effort being applied to the evolution of the language – especially in the domain of libraries. In fact, most of the core language features on the left side exist to support the development of the upcoming libraries on the right.

In addition to the forthcoming minor 2014 release of C++, which adds a handful of new features and fixes some bugs/omissions from C++11, the next major release is slated for 2017. Of course, we won’t get all of the features and libraries enumerated on the slide, but the future looks bright for C++.

The biggest challenge for Herb et al will be to ensure the conceptual integrity of the language as a whole remains intact in spite of the ambitious growth plan. The faster the growth, the higher the chance of the wheels falling off the bus.

“The entire system also must have conceptual integrity, and that requires a system architect to design it all, from the top down.” – Fred Brooks

“Who advocates … for the product itself—its conceptual integrity, its efficiency, its economy, its robustness? Often, no one.” – Fred Brooks

I’m not a fan of committees in general, but in this specific case I’m confident that Herb, Bjarne, and their fellow WG21 friends can pull it off. I think they did a great job on C++11 and I think they’ll perform just as admirably in hatching future C++ releases.