ISO C++ WG21 meeting in Cologne, Germany 2019

From July 15 to July 20, think-cell co-sponsored the WG21 working meeting which took place in Cologne, Germany this year. The meeting has been a big success and the next version of the C++ standard, i.e., C++20, has been declared feature complete. We are grateful to Nicolai Josuttis, the host, all other organisers and all attendants for making this meeting, the biggest yet, so successful.

Since we always use the latest C++ standard that our compilers support, we are very much looking forward to C++20. The std::format proposal finally brings type-safe formatted output to C++. constexpr std::vector and std::string containers make compile-timing meta-programming more powerful and less painful, which is very welcome. During the Cologne meeting it also became clear that there was too little consensus to include C++ contracts in the C++20 standard. A new Study Group has been formed that will continue to work on contracts. We absolutely agreed with the many others who thought contracts should not be included at this time. We prefer to wait a bit longer to make sure the C++ standard actually meets our needs and those of the community.

If you are interested in the full details, we recommend the jointly edited trip report on “Reddit”.