Hacker News Reader

I think the most important change to C++ is the addition of a memory model and standard primitives for threading. In its current state, writing a truly thread-safe, portable program in C++ is nearly impossible.

Edit: For some detail on the subject, see Boehm's paper, "Threads cannot be implemented as a library." http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-209.pdf [PDF]

Lots of us use and love C++ and lots of new things is still being written in C++ — it is not a legacy language.

C++98 introduced us to generic programming and C++0x continues along that path.

Performance. Until someone rewrites the entire Haskell standard library to use unboxed primitives and that stream fusion voodoo then C++ sits alone at the intersection of performance, abstraction and usability.