On Sun, Sep 15, 2024 at 1:15 PM Andrzej Krzemienski via Boost
Recently, there was a situation in a WG21 triannual meeting that the proposal for inplace_vector had to be withdrawn in the plenary voting at the last moment because it was observed that what had been approved by the subgroups was unimplementable. Having the library in the Beman Project would have prevented that from happening.
The larger problem here is the structure of wg21, which assumes that all votes are equal. In other words, that everyone voting or everyone participating in the review of a particular proposal have ideas and talent of equal merit and skill. This is obviously not the case, and the inappropriate application of "democracy" (especially where meetings and votes are conducted in secret) here creates a predictable result: a reversion to the mean. There has been an unfortunate push towards driving increased attendance to WG21. If we assume a normal distribution of talent, this means that the most votes cast in committee will come from the average skilled. This might be OK if we are talking about designing a third party library or putting together a library collection, but it is definitely not OK if we are talking about changing the standard. The Beman Project may offer a temporary salve but it suffers from the same structural weakness. The bar is set too low. It should be setting off alarm bells that WG21 is so dysfunctional that requiring authors to prove something is implementable is needed. Thanks