C++14 Committee Draft is here and can be accessed at isocpp.org. This is in keeping with the practice of greater transparency allowing us to publish the Committee Draft (CD) early instead of at fixed Standard reflector mailing intervals. Without this facility, we would have either had to hurry to make the publication 2 weeks ago or wait to publish it at the mid-term (between meeting) mailing interval, almost 2 months from now.
Having isocpp.org publish material between mailings give us this greater flexibility and transparency. This was also announced to the C++NOW crowd by Jens Weller at the Community evening session last night.
The publication of the CD actually requires a large amount of rechecking by a number of Standard volunteers, usually the chairs of various subgroups of the integration of all the features from the editor, Stefanus du Toit. Thank you to them all. I know as late as yesterday morning, many were still checking the work before sign-off was given to post. You can get a clear idea of the C++14 content in my article "The View form the C++ Standard meeting April 2013" and I am likely to give a talk on it in the near future, although I did give a talk on this at ADC++2013.
This is not actually the finalized form of C++14. Now it must go through National Body (NB) Balloting at the SC22 level, a process that takes 3 months. This is where NBs such as Canada, US, France, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland and many others will issue their comment. These comments will be given priority to be addressed at the next Standard meeting at Chicago in late September. If it goes well, it will become a Draft International Standard (DIS) coming out of the Chicago meeting. At that point, it will require 5 more months of balloting at the JTC level. If that stage is approved, then it can become a valid International Standard (IS), after 2 more months of balloting at the JTC level, which is the parent body of SC22, the parent body of WG21. All told, if all the steps goes well, a ratified C++14 will be released summer 2014, likely at the Rapperswill, Switzerland meeting. IF any of the step fails because some NB comment could not be addressed, then a second CD may need to be issued, which would push the process back, likely until end of 2014, or even past it.
I am here at C++NOW giving a talk on Transactional Memory in C++, based on our latest syntax and semantics that will likely go into the Technical Specification. I have given a similar talk at each of ACCU2013 and ADC++2013 to acquaint folks with the need for Transactional Memory to an average audience of 100-200. However, I heard the video is not working due to battery failure while I was speaking, so you may have to get the video from ACCU2013. While here, I did a few video interviews on the state of C++11, C++14, and OpenMP which I hope will be posted soon. At C++NOW, I also gave an overview of isocpp.org in an evening session on Wednesday where Jens Weller of Meeting C++ and Jon Kalb, one of the organizer of C++NOW, Code Camp, and other community C++ conferences gave their talk about how to build community conferences and user groups. They achieved astounding success showing how hot C++ is right now at this moment. I had personally hope to gain a Canadian C/C++users group here to gather the Canadians who use C and C++ but have not had great success, due to my severe lack of spare time. Although members within this community does include Herb Sutter of Microsoft, Stefanus du Toit of Intel, Tony Van Eerd of RIM and me as we are all Canadians. May be I can learn something from them.