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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Just curious... what has changed in C++ land so suddenly? It was hard to get any improvement in language out for like a decade and how we are seeing C++14 features already standardized and implemented in just an year!! Something dramatic has happened in C++ standardization process but can't find much information on that.

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Herb Sutter gives a hint of what's going on in this video:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/2013/Keynote-He...

Thanks for the link! Would you mind summarizing a few relevant points from the hour and a half long video? ;)

He mentioned stuff like shifting from an static to a living language (figuratively speaking and mostly referring to the revision frequency).

There were also a proposal to include mature libraries into the standard (i.e boost, cairo, etc. He also said that was impossible with number of people on the comittee and they included more members in the form of study groups focusing in different features/libraries.

I believe the major points would be that they recognized the need to make the ISO C++ revision cycle faster

I'm also curious what proportion of the committee was made up of "old guard" folks ten years ago compared to today.

Well since there were ~30-50 regulars on the committee before 2012 and attendance is now closer to ~100 (can't find the source now, IIRC one of Herbs talks) it is quite easy to see that there is lot of "fresh blood".

The sudden drop in the user base, people left for languages with all the features mentioned in this post? I am not sure....

I'll have to look it up, but after ISO approved the 03 standard, the committee thought there was a waiting period before the next draft standard could be worked on, is my hazy recollection (there wasn't any wait period, but that took at least a decent chunk of time)

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