Almost zero drama and almost no feature creep or breaking changes. The team seems to have a focus, and does not change it easily. That is important for a programming language, and it doesn’t happen organically.
The backwards compatibility promise:
Programming languages more than almost any other type of project end up swamped with thousands of competing requests to implement mutually incompatible features. Some languages do better than others at saying no, and those languages tend to be the ones that achieve widespread adoption.
Unfortunately that’s not at all true - Go is a real outlier here. If it were true, we’d all be writing C instead of C++, Lua instead of Python and ES5 instead of TypeScript.
If you don't agree with the available languages, make it better. That's the power of open source :)
Who gave him control over what sees widespread adoption?
I'm definitely considering the same, and you're right - it's not C++ itself that appeals to me at all, it's the libraries. I'm not sure what C libraries I'd use for collections (instead of the STL and Abseil [0]), or in lieu of CLI11 [1] or Dear ImGui [2].
[0] https://abseil.io/about/design/swisstables
Hm. Wasn't (the lack of) generics pretty drama filled? Especially the way they fought against it for so long.
Code review happens in public, not on GitHub but on Gerrit. The main issue tracker is public, on GitHub. Proposals are largely handled on the issue tracker. There are public mailing lists, etc.
Surely, there are face to face private meetings. And there are likely also private issue trackers, mailing lists, and etc. And, yes, sometimes, a seemingly arbitrary decision pops up, that was clearly discussed elsewhere.
But these comments seem to come from people who never even tried to contribute, or deal with the process.
I've done docs fixes as a total newb, had to convince the Windows maintainer to let me fix a Windows issue (that a year later produced flaky tests, which I fixed), made and got a proposal accepted, have a project in the linkname hall-of-shame, which led to another successful proposal to open up APIs (which then failed tests on some platforms, which I fixed).
All with little drama, pure engineering.
Is that true? In what sense? I was under the impression the editions took care of that.