points by materielle 4 days ago | 0 comments
As somewhat of an outsider, the C++ spec process seems really strange to me.
It’s weird that major features are designed from start to finish without even having so much as a demo.
It feels like there should be a back and forth process between committee proposal -> experimental impl in a major compiler -> community feedback, and so on.
It sounds like it’s basically the waterfall approach to language design? They write a glorious spec and chuck it out to the world, and hope that compilers can implement it and people actually find it useful. Example: modules.
Not necessarily. In broad terms, Boost is considered a staging ground for features proposed to C++. Compiler projects also keep up with the standards.
In this case the concept guys continuously dropped the ball on this requirement though. One of the papers pointing the many flaws in the proposal calls out this shortcoming, where contracts have neither a workable reference implementation nor an adequate specification. In fact, they handwaved a lot over details with vague calls to "implementation-defined".