Originally posted by: Michael_Wong

All, I have been wrong in not publishing for a long time. It reflects a particularly busy time for the C++ Standard. The reason is because we are planning to vote out a Final Committee Draft (FCD) at this meeting. This is a deviation from our original plan of issuing a second Beta with CD2. The new plan can effectively put us in a position to publish a ratified Standard by 2012, instead of another year later.

This acceleration in plan is because of several things.
1. All the subcommittee chairs (core, library, evolution, concurrency) have indicated that their defects (from National Body comments and other sources) can be reduced to 0 at this meeting.

2. The committee risks continued fracture of consensus as we move forward which would mean people will want to start pulling features that are not their favourite and put in new features that are. An FCD prevents that by restricting comments to fixes to existing content while another CD means people can still add/subtract features.

3. The Committee is tired after being driven on a death march to complete this work for the last 4 years. Continuing at this pace risk us losing capable volunteers to carry on the work.

Let's face it, the Standard will not be perfect at ratification. But it will be as best as we can put it. I believe it is in far better shape then the 1998 Standard because so many more people have opened defects, examined it, and delivered initial implementations of it.

Yes, not every feature in the Standard has been implemented and that is another point. It is always going to be a chicken and egg issue. As long as the Standard remains in draft, some vendors will want to hold back implementation for fear of expending resource on a major feature that can change. And customer usage will not be there until compilers come up with it.

I believe we should go for FCD now, and urge others to support that through their National Body reps. But I know also a number of people who are against it. We will see in a day or so how this goes.

This does not mean this will not be without controversies. The current paper groups have many last minute controversies which will promise fireworks at the full plenary.

I will return to a more regular schedule of updates because all my effort has been focused on examining proposals as well as answering defect issues in order to get the Standard to be ready.

Stay tuned. If an FCD goes out for C++0x, you will hear it first here.