Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, it changed my point of view that it is about time WG21 goes back to the old ways of only standardising existing practice, or at very least proposals without preview implementations shouldn't even get discussed in first place.

The problem is that with the new wind C++ got with C++11, its role in GCC and LLVM, and domains like HPC, HFT, GPGPU, WG21 got up to 300 something members, everyone wanting to leave their name on a C++ standard, many proposing features in PDF form only.

And since in ISO driven languages, what gets into a standard, does so by votes, not technical implementation merit, it is about doing a proper campaign to get the bases to vote for your feature, while being persistent enough to keep the process going. Some features have more than 20 revisions on their proposal.

> only standardising existing practice

But this would do nothing to introduce safety-related features, which are still sorely missing after 2+ decades. In light of upcoming regulation to exclude unsafe languages from certain new projects, maybe those features wouldn't be that unimportant after all.

The other side of that coin is that if you required "technical implementation merit", then only people or groups who have strong experience with C++ compilers would be able to propose things.

I'm not saying that the existing situation is ideal and it's certainly not a dichotomy, but you have to consider the detriments as well as the benefits.

You could have a two-stage process. Stage 1 would be the proposal, where you have the discussion on whether the feature is desirable or not, which can then be provisionally accepted. At this point it is not in the standard.

Then you have Stage 2, which would require an actual working implementation, so it can be properly tested and such. Acceptance in Stage 2 would result in the feature being in the standard.

Great, languages like C++ relevance on the industry, should have a "you should be this high to play" entrance price.

Also I should add this is no different on wannabe C and C++ replacements, or most other programming languages with similar market share.

Go try to do a drive by pull request for a new language feature on those ecosystems.

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