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Comment by lovecg | Hacker News Reader

Why does a language need a “moderation team”? C++ seems to do fine without one.

In this case, this a moderation of the community of human beings developing the rust compiler and its eco-system.

This is a team of human beings, who are going to have human interactions - tensions are bound to arise, and rules / traditions / taboos will develop to handle / resolve / hide them.

The Rust community seems to be having debates about those rules - not being part of the community, and not knowing anything about the situation, I have to brush it up as "someone else drama."

I suppose you can compare it to either the human interaction in the team of human beings developing `clang` (no idea how this is organized, or wether it has public politics / drama) ; and the C++ ISO community (which I'm pretty sure has loooooots of drama, but keeps it corporate and private.)

It absolutely does not, according to /r/cpp. There have been disputes that nearly led to physical violence, racial slurs, and more. It's just all more "private" by nature of happening in conference rooms and private mailing lists.

> nearly led to physical violence, racial slurs, and more

Nearly led == did not lead. So nothing happened?

Not to prevent people like this from becoming the executive director, that's for sure: https://archive.fo/f10KK

People tend to behave better in in-person meetings and on conference calls than on the internet in general. The Penny Arcade comic was too optimistic about the conditions for virtual communities to break down.

Arguably there's too much of it.

Does the C++ core committee have central forums for public discussion of features or is it exclusively a design-by-committee thing with mostly closed-door meetings?

I believe it has both. As far as I know, there are public discussions taken as advisory. Then the actual standards are written in a design-by-committee process. I believe those design meetings have public minutes, but participation requires being a member of the standards committee. I believer membership of the committee is possible through sponsorship with some seats being reserved for community members with high standing. How those seats are filled exactly I do not know.

It has a five-member "Directions Committee", vacancies filled by invitation. The group's minutes are not public, but they have no authority beyond their persuasiveness. The members are there because they were already respected.

Which meetings? Some are more closed door than others. The big committee meetings are open door, anyone can come (pre covid). There are official ISO votes where you need to have your countries' blessing to vote (one vote per country), but most votes are just straw polls and anyone who shows up can vote.

There are also core teams that are closed door. And sub committees, some of which are more welcoming of outsiders than others. In the end though, if you submit a paper the relevant committee will read it and then invite you to come talk about it (at your expense to get there, but they will find a sponsor if needed).

It has public mailing lists.

https://lists.isocpp.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/

C++ does also not have a compiler team nor any C++ day-to-day development team.

Sure it does, just not one centralized one. LLVM and GCC are very actively maintained and both main teams have many active C++ committee members. Unless you want to split hairs and argue semantics, they are the closest thing to a day-to-day development team and are quite underappreciated if you ask me.

I appreciate them but that's also the difference between Rust and C++ - the implementations are separable from the language itself. GCC is not C++ and vice versa.

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