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Comment by mratzloff | Hacker News Reader

I can't even imagine the amount of work that goes into producing a specification like this, BUT... I wish there were a reduced price option for individuals. I just can't justify spending USD 200 on getting a copy for myself. I'd love to have a copy so I don't have to rely on second-hand sources like websites and implementation details from STL maintainers on Reddit or Stack Overflow.

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You can build the pdf yourself from the LaTeX source: https://github.com/cplusplus/draft

Or get the latest public draft from https://wg21.link/standard

Or an html version: http://eelis.net/c++draft/

Thanks. I just like having an official (not draft) copy. I'm a nerd.

I just built from the LaTeX source and it's 32 pages longer than the public draft in the second link from 6 weeks ago. Maybe just additional descriptive language, but...

Reading https://github.com/cplusplus/draft, it seems you had to generate figures from their dot source.

If so, the result may depend on your installation (probably even if you use the same version of GraphViz but a different OS and/or set of fonts), and that can affect pagination.

Also, are you sure you built for the same paper size? A4 vs US letter could explain the difference.

Well, you can see changes as recently as two days ago.

https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/commit/83e302d3bb6a5f8855...

In one way, the last draft is more canonical than the official spec - if you are talking chapter and verse to another person about the spec, odds are good that they are referring to the last public draft also.

The C++ draft and published standard are so similar, the only parties I imagine would need the published copy are gcc frontend developers, technical managers at IBM, etc. As an individual who gets into the deep dark crevices of C++, I've never needed the tiny details the published standard offers. They are mostly typographical.

iirc even gcc devs don't have it and use the draft

The reduced price option for individuals is that you just look at the last working draft, which is always published for free for all ISO standards and is almost equivalent to the final product.

The only reason anyone cares about the officially published standard is if you're a compiler vendor who wants to know for sure that your product is standards compliant, which is why the cost for the no-draft versions is what it is.

The almost equivalent is always the scary part. Is there a guarantee that there is no technical difference between the draft and final standard? From your reply, it seems, it is intentionally not specified what exactly are the differences to force compiler vendor to buy the standards. But then the one using a draft is always scared there is one thing different which he has not looked into and this is causing problems somehow.

Non-editorial changes would have to be voted in. This is not an easy process which can happen late.

And mind: It's not only for compiler vendors. An ISO standard is a legal document. Based on your country you might put in your software's contract that your code is compliant C++ code or might consult the standard in a legal debate with a commercial vendor. All quite limited ... but not only compiler vendors.

When C++11 came out, I bought the ANSI copy (identical to the ISO one except for the front page if I remember correctly) for $30. It sure beat the ISO version in terms of price.

You can probably build the drafts from the github repo: https://github.com/cplusplus/draft/tree/c++17

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