I just got back from teaching a class, and I’m always amazed at the breadth and diversity of C++ developers. As Bjarne Stroustrup famously says: “No one knows ‘what most C++ developers do.'”

In particular, I’m surprised at how strongly some people feel about certain features, such as refactoring or safety or raw performance or exhaustive conformance, that don’t matter much at all to other people, and it made me wonder how a cross-section of the C++ developer community might prioritize them if I ran a poll.

So let me pose a question: Whether you use gcc or Clang or VC++ or Intel C++ or any other compiler, if you could only pick five of the following for your compiler to implement in its very next release, which would they be? Note that this is intended to be purely an “urgency” or ordering exercise, not an “importance” or eventually-will/won’t-do exercise — assume that your compiler vendor would eventually add everything possible from the list in their next few releases, and ask yourself only what would you just love to have in your hands the very soonest, right away?

(This is not intended to be a complete list, by the way, just picking some things I’ve again recently heard people mention, to validate how broadly interesting they really are.)

Thanks in advance for your participation. I’m really curious to see the results.

[Updated to add: Several people have asked to change the poll to add an option for “faster build times”. I won’t change the poll while in progress which would skew results, but for now if you want to vote for “faster builds” please post it as a comment and I’ll manually add those comments up since that seems to be a popular request.]