[revised 9/8 to reflect that there is no need to wait till the next WG21 meeting]

As I mentioned in my Kona (March) trip report, WG21 (the ISO C++ committee) completed work on C++17 at our March meeting. At that point it was technically finalized, and since then we have been in the final procedural endgame of formal ISO approval and publication.

Today, I’m pleased to report that the last major ballot was completed: A few hours ago, the C++17 DIS (Draft International Standard) ballot came back with 100% approval, 23 editorial comments, and no technical comments. Unanimous approval of a DIS means that we get to skip the FDIS ballot (as we hoped) and proceed directly to publication. As far as ISO is concerned, we are now done and they are just waiting for us to update the document editorially and send them the final PDF we want to be published.

So the remaining steps are:

The project editor (Richard Smith) and helpers will review and resolve the editorial comments, and any other pending editorial tweaks they feel like fixing (e.g., speling, formatting). This includes generating the official record of response paper summarizing what was done for each editorial DIS comment received.

We send the final PDF to ISO for publication, and ISO after a month or two ISO publishes it in the ISO store.

Note again that all this is just formally putting a bow on C++17. WG21’s active project now is C++20, and we already began work on that at our last meeting in Toronto, including to add a major feature (concepts!), and we’ll continue serious work on that in Albuquerque and beyond.

This is a product of many people’s labors and many often-unsung efforts. Thank you again to the hundreds of participants in the ISO C++ committee, and many interested commenters and helpers in the community, for all your work and support for C++ standardization.