Interview
Bjarne Stroustrup: C++ Standards - C++03, C++11, C++14, C++17, C++20
- The committee is scheduled to meet in Cologne, Germany, next week for a week-long session to standardize C++20 and vote on its committee draft, which will subsequently move to National Standards Committees for feedback.
- The committee aims to secure favorable votes in a second round to achieve consensus, operating under a model that rejects split outcomes and seeks universal agreement to prevent dialect fragmentation.
- C++20 is projected for shipping in 2019, following a three-year cycle designed to identify development slips within three to four years rather than a decade later.
- Compiler implementers anticipate a predictable schedule, with the speaker asserting that "almost everybody" will ship "almost everything" for C++20 by that time.
- Despite the scheduled release, a delay of one or two years is expected due to the gap between feature freeze and the final shipping date within the new cycle.
- Historical timelines indicate a shift from an initial six-to-eight-year hope to the 13-year duration taken for C++11, contrasting with the on-time delivery of C++14 and C++17 and the 1998 completion of the first standard following 1990 technical meetings.
- While organizations may extend to UC++, the voting structure applies to individuals, though the speaker acknowledges uncertainty regarding whether all parties agree that the standardized process is superior to individual or single-organization decision-making.