Honestly? No idea how the committee is thinking. When, say, gamedev people write proposal, ask for a feature, explain it is important and something they depend on and so on, it gets shot down on technicality. Then they turn around and produce some insane feature that, like, rips everything east to west (like modules), and suddenly voting goes positive.
The "abstract machine" C++ assumes in the standard is itself a deeply puzzling construct. Luckily, compiler authors seem much more pragmatic and reasonable, I do not fear -fno-exceptions dissapearing suddenly, or code that accesses mmapped data becoming invalid because it didn't use start_lifetime_as
So as to your understanding
> freestanding C++ requires the C++ standard library, but not the C standard library
is true?
> The "abstract machine" C++ assumes in the standard is itself a deeply puzzling construct.
I find the abstract machine to be quite a neat abstraction, but I am also more of a C guy.