C++ Library Working Group Status Report (Mid-term 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 post-Antipolis 2008 mailing.

There is a minimal crossover with the State of Evolution paper N2705 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 all features for the new standard and distribute a CD for ISO ballot following the San Francisco meeting in 2008, followed by an FCD for ballot at the end of 2009 proceeding to FDIS and final publication in late 2010.

In order to reach this goal, the threading library produced by the draughting comittee at Kona has been adopted, although concern was expressed by the Review Committee about the time-related portion of that document. Subsequently, chapter 31 of the working paper has been removed, and replaced by N2661.

A second proposed compromise to meet the timetable is the scaling back of the garbage collection feature. This has now been adopted as N2670.

The third compromise of a reduce scope 'asynchronous return buffer' was presented to the Library Working Group in Bellevue, and is close to final form in N2671, which has been held back one additional meeting to reduce complexity of the exception hierarchy used.

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 the next meeting. 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.