The ISO C++ committee met in Santa Cruz, CA, USA on October 19-24. You can find the minutes here, which include the votes at the whole-group sessions but not the details of the breakout technical sessions where we spend most of the week.

The good news is that there’s little new technical news. We did a lot of work during the week, but it was mostly working on refining the standard, deciding integration questions of how two language features should work together in cases not clearly described, fixing bugs, and answering national body comments on our first public draft last fall (those are now nearly all answered). We expect to produce another public draft at our next meeting in March.

We did vote in one small feature that I and Lawrence Crowl in particular had been working on: a simple async() facility to launch asynchronous work easily without messing with packaged_tasks and raw threads. Here’s a sample use, also demonstrating a simple use of the futures library and a lambda function for kicks:

future f = std::async( []{ OtherWork(); } ); //... do our own work concurrently with OtherWork ... OkayNowWeNeedTheResult( f.get() ); // blocks if necessary until f is ready

If you’ve been following the futures library, you’ll notice a name change above: We also renamed unique_future<T> to just plain future<T> as part of recasting the futures wording to make it clearer and more consistent. That’s an example of the kind of cleanup work being done.

Near the end of the meeting, we also discussed deprecating export (as I reported earlier) and exception specifications other than throw()-nothing. There seemed to be significant support for deprecating both, and so we’ll probably see a concrete proposal at our next meeting.

In sad news, the convener (chair) of the committee for the past year, P.J. Plauger, stepped down at the end of the meeting. After I had been the convener for two three-year terms from 2002 to 2008, I decided it was time for someone else to have a go and so Plauger replaced me a year ago. He has done a really great job over the past year and his contributions in that role will be missed, but we won’t lose his services entirely as he remains an active participant in the committee. I will probably volunteer again to replace him.

That’s pretty much it. The next meeting of the ISO C++ standards committee is in March:

(Edited to fix “2009” in the title and add a link to the Pittsburgh meeting invitation.)