[stiglitz]

By ”stagnation” do you mean “not getting new features”?

[jacoblambda]

C++ has gotten a ton of quality of life features with each update. The issue is less that new features aren't coming and more that new features bake through countless iterations of proposals for close to or often over a decade until everyone in WG21 is happy.

So it's not that we aren't getting features. They are coming quite fast and people regularly complain that new C++ has too many things for them to learn and keep up with. The issue is that those are the same features everyone has been asking for for over a decade so the people that really care found workarounds and eventually move over to the new std way of doing things when they can while everyone else continues waiting for that one feature they really care about.

[maccard]

Also that the features c++ is getting are bolt on additions that we already have solutions for. I think fmt is a great example - fmt is a header only library that can be dropped in. Meanwhile std format was standardised without printing to stout. That took 3 years to standardise. Meanwhile we’re working on things like ranges, and instead of implementing them in the language it’s shoe horned in as a library feature - we now pay massive compile time hits for these features that are being shoved in alongside the kitchen sink. Meanwhile the solution (modules) has been talked about longer than I’ve been writing c++, it’s still unusable, and it hasn’t shown one of the key things people have been begging for for a decade - faster compile times.

I think the committee is focused on the wrong things

[account42]

Personally I'd rather the comitte take longer and require more implementation experience before accepting new features. There are still too many half-baked ideas that turn out to be mistakes afterwards, resulting in either needless breaking changes or being stuck with bad solutions.

This is especially true for library features where users can always use third party libraries for containers/algorithms that are yet to be standardized (or indifinitely - not everything should be added to the stdlib). But even language features can and should exist as compiler extensions before we are stuck with them.

[physicsguy]

> the people that really care found workarounds

Or stopped writing C++, I'd consider myself one of these for many use cases I used to use it for.

[Grayskull]

> They are coming quite fast and people regularly complain that new C++ has too many things for them to learn and keep up with.

I never got this. Can't you just decide to use subset of the language? No-one forces people to use every single feature. It's okay to use C++ like "C with classes" and occasionally cool new thing, when it is right tool for the job. Only people where this argument is truly valid are compiler/tools people.

[adrianN]

The people complaining and the people asking for features need not be overlapping sets.

[lenkite]

Wish C++ fixed some of its mistakes in the standard library. std::regex is embarrassing when even Python can beat it and nobody uses std::unordered_map due to its pointer chasing. Basic Maps are something that you shouldn't need to use a third party library for.

[okanat]

I think the bureaucratic cadence of the things also make C++ not a unified entity. C++ is patchwork language. So many of the new features don't work well together or don't fit together or they have conflicting goals.

Since the proposals target problems with differing philosophies, they each have different traps in them from bad time complexity to outright unrefined behavior. Keeping up with the updates hard because of this.

I think many C++ projects are (or will be) basically infeasible to maintain not because of the old problems but due to the exploding complexity of the interactions of all features, unless developers actively ban using large parts of the language.

[vlovich123]

N3340 is from 2011. Prior to c++11 they had failed to deliver major changes to the language. And arguably the disfunction is still there where big ideas get destroyed in committee (reflection) or take forever and come out half-baked (modules).

[rerdavies]

Speaking of half-baked, did continuations get fixed?