On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 3:30 PM, Beman Dawes
Herb Sutter, the Convenor of the ISO C++ Standards Committee, will be making some announcements tomorrow likely to be of interest to C++ developers in general and Boosters in particular. The venue is a talk titled "The Future of C++" at the Microsoft Build Conference.
While some of Herb's announcements will be specific to Microsoft, the key C++ initiatives involve Boost and the whole C++ community. Some of the ideas evolved from feedback Herb got at C++Now/BoostCon 2012 last May.
I'll post a summary of the announcements tomorrow, but you can also watch the live stream at http://channel9.msdn.com at 12:45 PM Pacific time.
Here is the summary, in reverse order from Herb's presentation: * The isocpp.org web site has begun operations. This site is intended to act as "The home of Standard C++ on the web — news, status and discussion about the C++ standard on all compilers and platforms." * The Standard C++ Foundation has been formed. See http://isocpp.org/about for more information. Note the wide industry support (backed by donations of money) and the Boost representation on the Board of Directors. The first project funded by the Foundation is the isocpp.org web site. * The timeline for the C++ standards committee over the next 24 months is aiming for three Technical Specifications (including a Filesystem TS, based on Boost.Filesystem V3), and a minor revision of the C++ standard (tentatively C++14), with technical corrections and some minor new language and library features. Following that, there will be a constant stream of Technical Specifications and then a major revision of the standard (tentatively C++17)). In other words, much more frequent releases than in the past. * Microsoft has released an out-of-band community technical preview (CTP) for their compiler, adding explicit conversion operators, raw string literals, function template default arguments, delegating constructors, uniform initialization, and variatic templates. (See http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C9-Lectures-Stephan-T-Lavavej-Core-C-/STLCCS... for instructions on how to use the CTP). Microsoft is promising more such feature releases during the first half of 2013. This is important for the whole C++ community, since it means that full C++11 support is becoming a reality across all widely used compilers. Herb's presentation has a lot of interesting perspectives. You can watch it at http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/2-005 --Beman