Oh. And we’re still lacking any kind of sockets support. There’s this thing I’m hearing about called the Internet that’s going to be big any day now and might need this.
The main reason why all these things haven't really been integrated into the main language yet is because the committee is still experimenting with various approaches to asynchronous programming and scheduling with goals of also integrating these with heterogeneous computing.
Also sockets are arguably an outdated networking model anyway, so people really serious about high-performance networking will be doing their own thing regardless.
A TS is almost nothing in the c++ world. Each implementation will have its own quirks and unreliable cross platform behavior if it’s even available. There are well established filesystem libraries too (heck the STL implementation is almost identical to boost for that reason to make it easier for those people to port and for the library maintainers you basically just wholesale copy an implementation or at least have a reference one to test most things against).
> Also sockets are arguably an outdated networking model anyway, so people really serious about high-performance networking will be doing their own thing regardless.
I’m eager to hear what you mean by this because I’m unaware of any OS APIs that do Networking in any other way. Unless you’re talking about userspace drivers or DPDK, neither of which see serious adoption outside of data centers (if even there). 99.99% of an networking code I’ve observed across mobile and cloud is socket-based.
Regardless, the io_uring interface, which is general-purpose and still based on file descriptors for its initialization, does go out of its way to work around some of the problems with the socket model.
Between libcurl, POCO, or even Qt, does it matter at all that the C++ standard offers "any kind of sockets support"?
Just because Java forced everything under the sun into their standard library, that does not mean that move makes any sense at all. Between Boost and Apache and POCO and others like that, it's high time we stop insisting in this nonsense.
You could easily make the same counter argument against including <filesystem> and yet there’s very real value to having something cross platform out of the box that handles elegantly various pitfalls that people typically fall into.
Given that Java followed that path and already acknowledged that mistake by deprecating the original HTTP client, why do people insist in not learning lessons?
What is available as external library has various levels of support quality.
That is why we have POSIX, the C runtime that ISO C didn't want to rely on, yet almost every C program uses a part of it.
Still it was deemed important enough to spend development resources on the POSIX subsystem to make DoD happy, then SFU and now integrate the Linux kernel.
Common sense anyway would suggest that "almost every" is distinct from "many, but also many not", and the latter is what I think would be a better fit here.
The intention behind my comment (and I thought it was clear without any "semantics" discussion required) was to show that there is no need for the POSIX layer to be included as part of ISO C. POSIX is just a "platform layer" (for all I know), meaning that it is much closer to a "library" than a "runtime". I don't see a need to bundle it tightly with the language. Heck, why did I even bring up Windows as a counterexample, when there are probably a lot of more-or-less ISO C conforming compilers for microcontroller platforms that could never support POSIX.
As for HTTP within the standard library, I would probably tend to agree although I’d note that Python does have it in its standard module set and I don’t think there’s an acknowledgement that that’s somehow a mistake. Each language fills a different need so framing it as “people insisting in not learning lessons” isn’t helpful. Not to mention that the best way to learn is to experiment and double check if what was once true remains that way (experts know when and in what way to break rules).