Yesterday, many thousands of you were in the room or live online for my talk on The Future of C++. The talk is now available online.
This has been a phenomenal year for C++, since C++11’s publication just 12 months ago. And yesterday was a great day for C++.
Yesterday I had the privilege of announcing much of what Microsoft and the industry have been working on over the past year.
(minor) C++ at Microsoft
On September 12, we shipped VC++ 2012 with the complete C++11 standard library, and adding support for C++11 range-for, enum class, override and final. Less than two months later, yesterday we announced and shipped the November 2012 CTP, a compiler add-in to VC++ 2012 adding C++11 variadic templates, uniform initialization and initializer_lists, delegating constructors, function template default arguments, explicit conversion operators, and raw string literals. Details here, and download here.
Note that this is just the first batch of additional C++11 features. Expect further announcements and deliveries in the first half of 2013.
(major) C++ across the industry
Interest and investment in C++ continues to accelerate across the software world.
- ISO C++ standardization is accelerating. Major companies are dedicating more people and resources to C++ standardization than they have in years. Over the next 24 months, we plan to ship three Technical Specifications and a new C++ International Standard.
- C++ now has a home on the web at isocpp.org. Launched yesterday, it both aggregates the best C++ content and hosts new content itself, including Bjarne Stroustrup’s new Tour of C++ and Scott Meyers’ new Universal References article.
- We now have a Standard C++ Foundation. Announced yesterday, it is already funded by the largest companies in the industry down to startups, financial institutions to universities, book publishers to other consortia, with more members joining weekly. For the first time in C++’s history since AT&T relinquished control of the language, we have an entity – a trade organization – that exists exclusively to promote Standard C++ on all compilers and platforms, and companies are funding it because the world runs on C++, and investing in Standard C++ is good business.
This is an exciting time to be part of our industry, on any OS and using any language. It’s especially an exciting time to be involved with C++ on all compilers and platforms.
Thank you all, whatever platform and language you use, for being part of it.
Links:
Sutter’s Mill 
@Glen: Thanks, that’s very helpful. I hadn’t run across it because I follow the Forums via email only. This is annoying to me too (now) because it gives the impression that isocpp.org is crashing your browser whereas it’s actually the third-party Google Groups as used within an iframe (to keep the site’s chrome and make it look more integrated) that seems to be what’s really failing.
As we evaluate using Google Apps/Groups vs. Mailman for the committee’s own use and for isocpp.org, I think you’ve identified two important things that appear to weigh in Mailman’s favor:
1. Multiple/third-party logins: I think it’s important that no login at all is needed to read any part of isocpp.org, and that just one login into isocpp.org is sufficient to do anything else including posting comments. And, as you’ve already pointed out, Google requires a third-party Google login which isn’t great. If we do stick with Groups (and for now in the interim while we’re using it), I’m inclined to drop the iframes entirely and link to it as a third-party separate service to set expectations that it really is third-party and hopefully mitigate confusion. I’ll look into that this week.
2. Integration with isocpp.org: But I also think it’s desirable to be able to correctly embed the forum browse-and-search within isocpp.org itself. After all, why not host the forums as part of the site given that we are running them ourselves? As you’ve shown, Groups doesn’t seem to support this well, and works better as a standalone service..
These will probably weigh in favor of Mailman as we continue to test out Groups and Mailman to see which is the right technology to run with for the committee and the site. Having said that, these aren’t the only criteria and Groups may end up being better overall, but they’re two fairly big hurdles to overcome that I don’t think these particular items are issues with Mailman.
Thanks again. I really appreciate this helpful feedback and the specific repro.
Hi Herb
One very topical sequence that seems the most repeatable to me is this one:
If i sign in, then go to proposals, then scroll down the list of peoples topics/suggestions, then click the (irritatingly named) “sign in to reply” button, it takes me to google’s sign in page. If I then hit “back” (since infact I have already signed in, just not using google) i.e. 9 crashes, a good 50% of the time. It’s probably true that the site crashes every 5-10 minutes. in general for me, which I would wonder if it’s just my machine except this doesn’t happen on any other site at all.
I have all the latest patches for i.e. and windows 7 installed.
I’ve been tempted to try again with ie.10 and the latest platform update preview (or even just the preview on it’s own), but being a preview, I haven’t had the courage in case things get worse not better. (Curious to know if anyone e;se rates the windows 7 sp1 platform update preview as safe?).
I think the site is great, but I do think it’s a pretty big fail, and a 100% fail for me, that the site advertises that you can post topics and reply if you register but then fails to mention you have to have a google account to really do it, but despite that, it will happily accept a non google account when you sign up, and furthermore, it appears you can’t change your email address either? Not to mention the crashes.
Sorry in advance if I have missed an option/link here means any of this is untrue, but otherwise whichever of these facts is true, it should be on the front page. Otherwise, it’s quite the email harvester/generator and irritant for me right now and I wouldn’t have registered if I’d known this was the deal.
If I find any kind of crash trace with more useful information for you, I’ll let you know.
@glen: I’d love to know more about the crashes — we tried many browser/OS configurations across PCs/laptops/tablets/phones, including that one, and I haven’t seen any. If you have a repro (e.g., it crashes X% of the time when I do Y then Z) please let me know.
The main isocpp.org site is fully browseable without a login, and registering for a login is optional (it enables things like commenting) and free. However, the forums are actually currently separate and hosted by Google Apps/Groups as an interim test. We (the committee) are in the process of replacing our aging hand-written email lists, and are trying out Google Groups and Mailman; this is a test of the former. Groups has the disadvantage that it seems to want this extra login, which although free is still a Google login and several people have said they don’t like the second login. That’s one of the tradeoffs we’re going to discuss, and we’ll take it into consideration when choosing between Groups and Mailman in the coming months.
Herb
The isocpp.org website is great (though it crashes the browser completely all the time on windows 7 64 bit and ie 9 with all the latest patches).
What I don’t understand is why after registering with it, it then appears to require a gmail account to use the forums plus whatever email account you use to sign up with. Nowhere on the site does it say it requires two email accounts. Can you explain if that is infact the case please or can you use the forums with just one account, and can it be a hotmail account? In general, ‘m getting quite fed up with sites insisting on so much information for everything even programming discussions. Windows 8 appears to be going the same way.
Thanks
Since there are no other compilers mentioned here, I don’t see how you can get any impression at all from this article about how VC++ compares to other compilers.
Vegard made a good point. If you rely on Mr. Sutter article alone, you will leave with the impression that VC is a leader, but surely (in c++ world) it is a follower.
I love this, though Im affraid that because of this agISO :) way of doing things we might get new auto_ptr and vector of bool :)
@Vegard: Herb cannot really speak on behalf of the gcc team (his talk was in a double role, one representing the VC++ team at MS, one as part of the ISO standardization team). If you check the videos from Going Native 2012 you’ll see a talk given by Chandler Carruth of Google Inc., who’s part of the Clang team (which also is on a good way to full C++11 support). He’s also pat of WG21 now, which I think is pretty cool (fresh blood). I’m certain that if the gcc guys sent a representative of their project, they would be more than welcome to give talks on conferences like build and Going Native. It would’ve been also great if they had somebody in the standards working group.
It would be interesting to know why this is actually not happening, maybe Herb could give us some insight about the cooperation with the gcc folks in the standardization process and the proclaimed renaissance of C++. I could imagine that part of the reason is that gcc is not backed by a big corporation (and with the switch to GPLv3 actually boosted the development of clang as commercial supporters [Apple] now wanted a GPL free alternative), but that’s just speculation at my end.
Don’t you think the efforts put into the GNU C++ compiler/library is worth mentioning too? They’ve had full support for C++11 for longer than VC++, haven’t they?