C++ Standards Meeting Finalizes Feature-Complete Draft Standard

By Matt Austern and Lawrence Crowl, Google

In late September, Google hosted the 44th meeting of the ISO C++ Standards Committee in San Francisco, California. Approximately 50 members from seven countries met six days non-stop to nail down details of the new standard.

The new standard, "C++0x", will be a major upgrade to the language—the first major upgrade since C++ first became an International Standard in 1998. It will include support for concurrent programming, better abstraction power and efficiency, simpler programming, enhanced functional programming, upgraded generic programming, optional garbage collection, significant new library components (including TR1), and many other additions and cleanups. C++0x will still be recognizably the same language as today's C++, and it will be almost 100% compatible, but working programmers will find the new standard a much improved tool for serious application development.

All of the features in C++0x have been on the table for years, but this meeting was the one when the committee finally voted to commit to them. Among the long-awaited features added at this meeting were user-defined literals, symbol attributes, simplified iteration with Python-like for loops, library thread safety, and improved generic programming with "concepts".

This was an unusually busy meeting, and it achieved a major milestone: this is the meeting where the committee voted to advance the draft standard to Committee Draft. Or, in less bureaucratic language, we've shipped our beta. The language is now feature complete. The committee will still fix some bugs before the final version is officially released in 2010, and some features might get tweaked or even dropped, but you shouldn't expect major changes. Interested programmers can try the partial g++ implementation.