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0 pointstwoodfin4y ago0 comments

The C++ Committee story was primarily about Google and other large corporate interests advocating a large techno local change in the language to benefit their use case with no input or consideration for other users of the tool

Any links for background on this debate?

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throwaway17_174y ago

As I posted in the sibling comment, the Goals submission is at [1]. The Reddit and HN threads are pretty easy to search for (and there were quite a few). Summary, as I remember it, a group of primarily FAANG, with a large Google presence, authored a submission for the C++ Committee which was effectively a flag in the sand saying they (and their very deep pockets) wanted C++ to be primarily gear toward large, modern style development at large company scale. Removal of backwards comparability, limiting standard to only 64 bit architecture, preference for unstable ABI and language standard, etc. The document acknowledges that the use case they want the committee to push C++ towards is not for everyone, primarily because they all represent large money/scale interests, but they want the committee to go there way anyway.

1 - http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p213...

twoodfinOP4y ago

Thanks. I remember that proposal and thinking it was pretty wild.

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