(this is an echo of what I also just posted on isocpp.org)

I wanted to add a few more things to my meeting trip report. I updated the trip report in-place, but for those who want to see the “diffs” I’ll also post just the new parts here as a standalone post:

There were 106 experts at this meeting, officially representing 7 nations. This meeting saw a recent-record number of papers, including over 120 in the pre-meeting mailing.

In addition to the other things I mentioned, we also approved several other interesting changes, including the following highlights:

• Adopted N4230, which allows nested namespace definitions like namespace A::B::C { } as a convenient shorthand for namespace A { namespace B { namespace C { } } }.
• Adopted N3922, which fixes the most common pitfall with auto and {}, so that auto x{y}; now deduces the sane and expected thing, namely the type of y. Before this, it deduced initializer_list which was unfortunate and surprising. So, fixed.
• Adopted N4086, which removes trigraphs. Yes, we removed something from C++… and something that was inherited from C! But wait, there’s more…
• Adopted N4190, and actually removed (not just deprecated) several archaic things from the C++ standard library, including auto_ptr, bind1st/bind2nd, ptr_fun/mem_fun/mem_fun_ref, random_shuffle, and a few more. Those are now all removed from the draft C++17 standard library and will not be part of future portable C++.

We also did work and made progress on a lot of other proposals, including modules. See the pre-meeting mailing for details about papers considered at this meeting.

I just posted my ISO C++ meeting trip report over on isocpp.org covering our meeting in Urbana-Champaign earlier this month.

The ISO C++ committee is shipping more work sooner via concurrent Technical Specifications, but it’s still fairly new to find ourselves doing so much work that the “new normal” is to issue an international ballot from every ISO C++ meeting. This time, we have four ballots coming out of this meeting — the first (of two) ballots for the Transactional Memory TS, the final ballots for the Library Fundamentals TS and the Parallelism TS, and a new work item for C++17 since this was the first meeting of the C++17 era.

Oh, and we had evening sessions. Did I mention evening sessions? Five nights’ worth.

Now, two weeks later, I’m almost caught up on sleep.

Almost.

But what a blast. I’m looking forward to the next few smaller meetings over the winter, and the next full one in May.

Today my team was part of the Visual Studio 2015 Preview announcement, and it’s nice to be able to share that Visual Studio is now going to support targeting Android and soon iOS, using the Clang compiler, from right inside VS. This is in addition to continued conformance and other improvements in our own VC++ compiler for targeting Microsoft platforms.

I recorded an 8-minute video about Visual C++’s conformance improvements in our existing compiler that you can get now in the Preview available today, and why using a single source code base in C++ built using VC++ to target Windows/WP and also Clang/LLVM to target Android and iOS is a hot ticket right now. The Resources slide at the end includes links to two CppCon videos I hope you’ll check out if you haven’t already.

I hope you enjoy the news, and the Preview.