Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

There was in visual studio which has had it other than minor details.the real problem is tools are needed to make modules work and those needed a lot of work. The work was already partially there because it's the same work that Fortran needs which tools supported but there were just enough details different to be annoying. Fortran modules were something that were always an afterthought and when tools started realizing that this is going to be a big deal, they decided they had to do it right, which took a lot of time too.

Maybe you forget Hacker News of 10 years ago, but in 2015-2016, everyone was complaining C++ doesn't have modules and how awful it must be because they're not modules. Now that C++ has modules, they're complaining about how it has modules.

View on HN

I don't remember because I wasn't there :)

People are not complaining about the fact that C++ has modules, but about their usability and effectiveness. The compile time benefits seem modest and I have seen reports that it breaks Intellisense. (Maybe that's not true anymore?)

As Vittorio said, if it takes compiler vendors so long to implement them properly, maybe the design wasn't that good after all?

My point was: if you add such a big feature, shouldn't the standard require a sufficiently complete implementation? Otherwise, how can they assess whether the proposal actually works in practice and lives up to its promises?

Again, they had a sufficiently complete implementation. That implementation was in Visual Studio, clang had a very different implementation. The standard decided to take the Microsoft version. There are pros and cons to both and I will not fault the decision but either way one of the two had to lose and there is no surprise that for something complex it will take a long time to reimplement it to whatever the new standard is.

If the implementation really was sufficiently complete, then this is even worse! Why did they choose to vote something into the standard that is very complex and difficult to implement, but does not live up to the promises? Maybe they thought it would improve in the future, but isn't this a huge gamble?

I have heard rumors that certain people in the Visual Studio team have exaggerated the state of their modules implementation to speedrun the standardization process. I have no idea if that is really true, but it would explain a lot of things...

I'm not the only one who is asking these questions:

> I don’t know if they exaggerated their claims at the time, or if they didn’t properly fund the Visual Studio team since or what, but you can’t tell me 8 years wasn’t enough to make syntax highlighting work with modules. And if it is, then maybe there was something deeply wrong in their proposal and the committee should have asked to see the receipts before voting yes.

https://mropert.github.io/2026/04/13/modules_in_2026/

Agree that proof of implementation and real world experience should be a requirement for standardization. But it is a catch-22: implement it's are probably not always too keen to spend time on a large feature if it is not clear that it will be standardized.

In practice both clang and VS have had some form of module support for quite a while, but the final standard ended up being different from either implementation (shaped by their experience, and certainly with inevitable last minute inventions).

I wonder if for some features the committee should vote for general guidelines, the delegate a third party (one or more implementors) to come up with both an implementation and standardese with the understanding that it will be fast-tracked in wit too much bike-shedding

Reply on news.ycombinator.com