Red Hat at the ISO C++ Standards Meeting (June 2016, Oulu): Core Language

It was quite a trek to get to Oulu, Finland for the June 2016 C++ Standards Committee meeting, but we were warmly received and the meeting went well once we arrived. We had very pleasant weather most of the week, and it was fun to experience the midnight sun, even though it played havoc with my sleep schedule.

The main order of business at this meeting was to vote on a first Committee Draft (CD) of the (expected) C++17 standard, ideally with as much as possible of the work that has been moving through the pipeline. The Core and especially the Library working groups were very effective at moving through their workload of papers at this meeting: Core ended the week with no papers left to review, and Library got through ~50 papers and had only two left at the end.

As usual, the committee divided into multiple working groups: the primary groups that met throughout the week are Core language, language Evolution, Library, Library Evolution, and Parallelism/Concurrency (SG1). Also as usual, I spent the week in the Core language working group.

In my report on the Jacksonville C++ Meeting last February, I described various proposals that were working through the committee. Of the core language features I listed there as expected or hoped to make it into C++17 at this meeting, almost all did. Note that as of this writing the final revisions of the adopted papers have not been posted publicly yet, but the links should adjust when they are.