C++ Library Working Group Status Report (Belleuve 2008 Mailing)

This paper presents a quick summary of all papers submitted to WG21 for consideration by the Library Working Group, with an indication of their progress towards inclusion in the next C++ Standard or future TRs. It is based on the December 2007 mid-term mailing.

There is a minimal crossover with the State of Evolution paper N2507 where concurrency related topics tend to cross the Core/Library divide, and till now have been largely handled by the Evolution Working Group.

Note on progress

A clear statement of intent was made to complete work on the new standard in 2008, in order to achieve publication in 2009. To meet this timetable the plan is to vote out a feature complete Working Draught in two meetings time at Sophia-Antipolis in June. An FCD will be issued from the following meeting, allowing at least a minimal time for review and 'integration testing' of the new features.

In order to reach this goal, the threading library presented at Kona has been adopted, although a further round of work in an Editorial Committee will follow before a Review Committee signs off the draught wording for the project editor. While this proposal is feature and semantically complete, a little wordsmithing remains before it is ready for the Working Draught. It is expected to be incorporated in the Working Draught of the pre-Bellevue mailing.

The major challenge confronting the Library Working Group now is to review the current library for the application of the new Concepts language feature. It is expected that this will consume considerable time at each of the next two meetings. A challenge of a similar scale remains in processing the outstanding Issues List, not reflected here.

Note on previous documents

Much of the library development that has gone into the next standard occurred during the development of Library TR1. That process is captured in document N2364. The last revision of that TR is N1836.

Key to the tables

Papers have been grouped in a self-selecting manner as either new components or updates. There is usually a series of papers describing a proposal's evolution, and only the right-most paper is deemed current. Papers are listed in the order or the clause they apply to, or is most relevant. Exceptions are the updates for language features, which generally apply across the whole library.

Note that while the deadline for new proposals for C++0x is long past, work continues on TR2 and beyond, so new submissions remain welcome.

Proposals in a green font have advanced a category since the last meeting, those in red have moved back, while those in yellow are new or have been updated since the last meeting.

Proposals with a green background have been highlighted as the features that will be delivered in the next version of the standard in the Registration Document.

A Note on Technical Reports

As there will be a continuing series of TRs there is no hard cut-off date for when proposals will be accepted. Once a proposal is ready it will ship as part of the next available TR. There will be natural 'quiet periods' where proposals are accumulating with little attention though, as work focusses on shipping accepted proposals in the next standard, or the next TR.