News From the Front

The C++ Standards Committee met two weeks ago in Berlin. There's a lot going on, but from my perspective as a library implementor (and, admittedly, the author of an upcoming book), the biggest event was the acceptance of most of TR1 into the next C++ Standard.

TR1 is the Technical Report on C++ Library Extensions. It's been approved by the standards committee, and has made its way through the ISO bureaucracy to the point where it's official. But being official isn't the same as being part of the standard: It's advice of possible future directions. But now most of it is part of the next standard, so C++ compilers that claim to conform to the next ISO standard will have to provide, in addition to the current standard library, the newly added parts of TR1: shared_ptr and its kin, reference_wrapper, function, mem_fn, bind, type traits, random number generators, fixed size array and hashed containers, regular expressions, and most of the C99 library additions. If you want the details, the most recent draft of the TR is available at http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2005/n1836.pdf. Or (caution: shameless plug) buy my book when it comes out this summer. "The C++ Standard Library Extensions: a Tutorial and Reference", published by Addison-Wesley.

Posted by Pete Becker at 07:59 AM  Permalink