Here begins the part of my trip report that talks about the reason for the trip. I’ll probably combine several days into single posts since I might not have much to say that would be of interest to a general audience.
This week I’m attending meetings of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 and INCITS/C++, the standards committees for the C++ programming language. (It’s not a joint meeting, but the two committees meet at the same place at the same time. Ask the lawyers, I don’t understand it.)
I’ll begin by briefly describing how these meetings work, and then “below the fold” I’ll have a bunch of geeky info for folks who really like organizational charts (although I won’t have any actual charts).
We meet in full committee three times per year, although it was pretty much all Zoom during COVID. The first post-COVID face-to-face meeting was in November in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii (which I missed). This week we’re meeting in Issaquah, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. The summer meeting will be in June in Varna, Bulgaria.
We meet for five and a half days. Monday morning is a plenary session where we handle a bunch of administrivia (approve the agenda, approve the previous meeting’s minutes, stuff like that). After lunch, we break into subgroups where most of the actual work gets done. Saturday morning is another plenary session where we take formal votes. By the time we get to Saturday, everything is pretty much a done deal; and with the odd exception here and there, all motions pass by unanimous consent.
A couple hundred people from around the world show up at the meetings, and we’d never get anything done if we tried to do the real work in plenary sessions. Also, nobody knows everything, so we tend to gravitate to smaller groups where we might have some useful input. I, for example, will probably participate mostly in the Library Evolution Working Group which considers changes to the standard library.
We’ve adopted a very aggressive schedule of publishing a new version of the C++ standard every three years; and since
OK, now for the boring organizational stuff: