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Comment by arximboldi | Hacker News Reader

That was removed in C++11, precisely because compilers could not afford to implement it.

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/keyword/export

Even the authors of the only compiler that had ever implemented it (EDG) said that it was a lot of work for little benefit and pushed for outright removal without deprecatation.

Modules eventually, more than 20 years later, might be a better solution.

pushed for outright removal without deprecatation

And they got rebuffed by people that never managed to ship a working implementation. Standard committees yay!

Did they? extern was removed without deprecation.

Eventually! It was added to the standard over the objection of the only people with a working implementation, though.

Oh, right, I had forgot, EDG were against including it in the standard in the first place!

That seems very selfless of them. If they acted like other competitive markets, they'd want their competition to suffer the challenge that they did and they'd create a message that they were the first ones to satisfy the standard. They must really have the best interests of the language in mind.

They are! EDG is a tiny company but is extremely highly regarded and its founders (Stephen Adamczyk, John Spicer, Daveed Vandevoorde) are considered legends in the community.

At a time where GCC was still catching up, MSVC was in the dark ages and clang still not existent, EDG used to be the standard compliant C++ front end. It is still the front end for a lot of proprietary compilers (Intel, MSVC intellisense, Comeau) and I hear it is a very high quality codebase.

It has been a while since I played with what I wanted the 'export' to do (I guess get my templates split up with information hiding to reduce compile times).

What is common practice to do that now-a-days? Is that with modules (but I'm not sure if that is a standard yet, I could be mistaken).

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