alt Hacker NewsI recently watched the c++ documentary and it was super sobering in how it mirrors this description of the process. https://herbsutter.com/2026/06/04/c-the-documentary-released...
The true goal of C++ is the self-preservation and funding of the ISO Committee specification “engine”, while compilers are merely an accidental by-product.
Once you see this then suddenly a lot of odd behavior makes sense. For example the committee can’t break ABI because then the old companies wouldn’t fund the new c++ standard, but would fund a committee that maintains/forks the old thing. The complexity / bureaucracy also provides jobs for those involved in many ways including writing new books every year and or consulting.
While end consumers might really care about compile speed, modularization, security, and all of the things modern languages give, that is secondary to keeping the committee alive.
Younger me would be like, oh no this is horrible someone will fix this! Older me is more sober and understands that once a system is up and running it will continue as is (this being an example of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy). Security by the way of migrations to Rust is causing what the committee sees as the first real threat to its existence as its patrons start adopting more and more Rust. As a result the committee is proposing to break compatibility as a means to keep them around just a little longer. Note: Actually fixing the security issues is not important only giving enough for sponsors to not leave so we will see what actually happens.
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Between how long it took us to get standard library hardening in C++ and seeing what ISO did to the co-founder of MPEG, I'm convinced ISO is fundamentally incapable of actually being responsive to stakeholders, specifically because of the insane national body vetocracy.
For context, under Leonardo Chiariglione's stewardship, MPEG attempted to ship a royalty-free codec called Internet Video Coding (IVC) and it was immediately torpedoed by Samsung claiming ownership. In any sane environment you would amend the standard to remove the claimed technology, but ISO specifically does not allow you to do this. There is no obligation for an ISO participant to identify the patents being claimed unless they refuse to offer a license on FRAND terms. Ergo, Samsung just said "we own this and will sell licenses for money", and IVC was dead in the water as a standard[0].
Leonardo attempted to bring this to the attention of ISO, but the actual formal process for this was blocked by... you guessed it, a national body vetoing it. So the patent policy that prohibits ISO from distinguishing between royalty-free and royalty-bearing codecs stayed. Oh, and then they cut MPEG up into six pieces so Leonardo would have nothing to run anymore.
C++ was an unusual language in that, for about 10-15 years, the only other competing systems programming language was C - another ISO standard, and the one C++ was originally based off of. The standard answer to "but I want memory safety" was "use a garbage collector"[1]. I distinctly remember hearing interviews with compiler developers talking about how adding even these basic features to C++ would be interminably painful, because you'd inevitably have to debug some deeply nested macro in a library somewhere, so shut up and just enjoy that we gave you Vector<T>.at().
The day Rust becomes an ISO standard is the day it becomes dead to me.
[0] IVC was specifically designed to be inferior to the royalty-bearing H.265 standard, as Leonardo himself wanted to keep the royalty-free codecs second-tier.
[1] To be clear, there was research into non-GC languages with memory safety - that's where Rust got its ideas from - but it was a very small niche until Mozilla put their feet down and gave legitimacy to something.
You paint the sponsors in an unnecessarily negative light here.
They want to fund code they will use and that requires updating versions to be doable for like a million not twenty million.
Everyone loses site of the massive sizes of the codebases involved. When your codebase is measured in millions LoC minor breaks can be devastating.
Minor steps are fine and appreciated but "rip off the bandaid" is better left to alternative projects like Rust.