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Comment by initplus | Hacker News Reader

I feel more and more like Microsoft/Apple/GNU need to do what Apple/Mozilla/Google/Microsoft did when they turned their backs on the w3c and formed WHATWG.

If the standard committee can't even agree on concepts like the existence of a filesystem, we need a different committee.

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The standards committee have too broad of a scope and think they can make everyone happy. They want the same C++ to work on embedded and cloud servers while not making anyone update any of their old code and having full backwards compatiblility. This results in tradeoffs that make everyone unhappy.

We all know what happens when backwards compatibility gets broken.

Plus there are several options already when backwards compatibility isn't relevant.

> do what Apple/Mozilla/Microsoft did when they turned their backs on the w3c and formed WHATWG

You mean when they gave Google the power to add whatever they want to the standards and get the hate of web developers for "being the new IE" whenever they refuse to implement Google's API of the day?

Not sure I'd want that infinitely growing scope for compilers I use for production systems.

Who do you think calls most shots at ISO meetings?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with using implementation features. If you are writing code for servers or a desktop app... just use #pragma once. Even in the unlikely scenario that you eventually need to use a compiler which does not support this, transforming #pragma once to a #ifdefs is a bash oneliner.

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