alt Hacker News> it is fair to question if the problem is with the design/implementability of the feature itself.
The module story is just insane. How was it possible to get such a big feature into the standard without any working reference implementation? Isn't this the requirement for standard proposals to get accepted? If I compare this with how they treated JeanHeyd and his #embed proposal, the difference is staggering. To me it seems like a few powerful comittee members wanted to get modules into C++20 at any cost. This was just irresponsible.
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.