The ISO C++ committee met in San Francisco, CA, on September 15-20. You can find the minutes here, including the votes to approve papers.

The most important thing the committee accomplished was this:

Complete C++0x draft published for international ballot

The biggest goal entering this meeting was to make C++0x feature-complete and stay on track to publish a complete public draft of C++0x for international review and comment — in ISO-speak, an official Committee Draft or CD. As I predicted in the summer, the committee achieved that at this meeting. Now the world will know the shape of C++0x in good detail. Here’s where to find it: The September C++0x working draft document is essentially the same as the September 2008 CD.

This is “it”, feature-complete C++0x, including the major feature of “concepts” which had its own extensive set of papers for language and library extensions — I’ll stop there, but there are still more concepts papers at the mailing page and some more still to come during the CD phase. (If you get the impression that concepts is a big feature, well, it is indeed easily the biggest addition we made in C++0x.)

What’s next? As I’ve mentioned before, we’re planning to have two rounds of international comment review. The first of two opportunities for national bodies to give their comments is now underway; the second round will probably be this time next year. The only changes expected to be made between that CD and the final International Standard are bug fixes and clarifications. It’s helpful to think of a CD as a feature-complete beta, and we’re on track to ship one more beta before the full release.

And a new convener

On a personal note, I’m very happy to see this accomplished at the last meeting during my convenership. I’ve now served as secretary and then convener (chair) of the ISO C++ committee for over 10 years, and my second three-year term as convener ended one week after the San Francisco meeting. A decade is enough; I decided not to volunteer for another term as chair.

As of a few weeks ago, P. J. Plauger is the new convener of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG21 (C++). Many of you will know P.J. (or Bill, as he’s known within the committee) from his long service to the C and C++ communities, including that he has been a past convener of the ISO C standards committee, past editor of the C/C++ Users Journal, the principal author of the Dinkumware implementation of the C++ standard library, and recipient of the 2004 Dr Dobb’s Journal Excellence in Programming Award, among various other qualifications and honors. He has been a regular participant at ISO C++ meetings for about as long as they’ve been held, and his long experience with both the technology and the ISO standards world will serve WG21 well.

I’m very happy to have been able to chair the committee during the development of C++0x. Now as we move from “develop mode” into “ship mode” it will be great to have his experienced hand guiding the committee through the final ISO process. Thanks for volunteering, Bill!

This spring at SD West in Santa Clara, Bjarne and I did a fresh-and-updated S&S event with lots of new material.

We don’t usually repeat the same material, but this time there’s been such demand that we agreed to do a repeat… four weeks from today, in Boston. More information and talk descriptions follow.

CONTENT ADVISORY

Again, usually our S&S events feature mostly new material, but this one is almost identical to the material we did in spring 2008 in Santa Clara. Bjarne is substituting one talk, and will present “C++ in Safety-Critical Systems” instead of his talk on C++’s design and evolution; and we’ll both be updating to the material to reflect the current state of the draft ISO C++0x standard. But otherwise it’ll be identical.

So:

• If you missed our event this spring, here’s your second chance! It was our highest-rated S&S ever, and in the post-conference survey we asked the question “Would you recommend this course to a colleague?” and 100% said yes.
• If you already attended this spring and came to all our sessions, you’ve seen nearly all this material already, but feel free to encourage a friend or colleague to attend who you think would benefit from the material.

The Talks

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

C++0x Overview (Bjarne Stroustrup)

Safe Locking: Best Practices to Eliminate Race Conditions (Herb Sutter)

How to Design Good Interfaces (Bjarne Stroustrup)

Lock-Free Programming in C++—or How to Juggle Razor Blades (Herb Sutter)

Grill the Experts: Ask Us Anything! (Bjarne Stroustrup & Herb Sutter)

Thursday, October 30, 2008

[“Best of Stroustrup & Sutter”] Update of talk voted “Most Informative” at S&S 2007: Concepts and Generic Programming in C++0x (Bjarne Stroustrup)

What Not to Code: Avoiding Bad Design Choices and Worse Implementations (Herb Sutter)

C++ in Safety-Critical Systems (Bjarne Stroustrup)

How to Migrate C++ Code to the Manycore “Free Lunch” (Herb Sutter)

Discussion on Questions Raised During the Seminar (Herb Sutter & Bjarne Stroustrup)

Registration

This two-day seminar is getting billing on two different conferences that are running at the same time in the Hynes Convention Center: SD Best Practices and the Embedded Systems Conference. S&S is technically part of both conferences, which means you can attend S&S via either one… either

• register via SDBP, or
• register via ESC

and both ways will include options that include our two-day seminar.

I look forward to seeing many of you in Boston! Best wishes,

Herb

Even genuinely newsworthy topics can get distorted when commentators exaggerate or use data selectively. Here are two recent examples I noticed.

“This is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.” It’s true that it’s bad and even historic, and this sound bite correctly doesn’t actually claim it’s as bad as the Depression. I hope it doesn’t turn out to be in the same league as that; then, people were lining up at soup kitchens. For now, however, Apple is still on track to sell 10 million iPhone 3Gs this year, which says something.

“Yesterday [Monday, September 29, 2008] saw the worst single-day plunge in Dow Jones history.” “It’s a new Black Monday.” Well, these got my attention, because I remember Black Monday on October 19, 1987 very well. I was working in IT at a major bank, doing software application support for traders and related departments. When I went up to the trading floor that day, I immediately knew something was badly wrong because of the eerie sound as the elevator doors opened — a sound you never hear during trading hours, and certainly not from a room full of traders standing at their desks: silence.

Yesterday’s loss of 777 points was stunning as the largest single-day point loss in Dow history. But as a percentage loss that’s not even in the top 10 Bad Dow Days, all but two of which occurred before 1935. Those two since the Depression occurred on October 19 and 26, 1987, when the Dow lost 22.6% and then another 8% of its total value in single sessions, respectively #2 and #9 on All-Time Bad Dow Days list. For perspective, as of this writing the Dow is down 19.8% so far this entire year, and it surely hasn’t been a good year. Today’s crisis is already historic and could well get worse yet, of course, but some of us do remember some pretty bad ones in the past.

As good old Sam Clemens said (approximately), there are lies, darned lies, and statistics. Even when the statistics are true, always cross-check them for perspective. Even the best news and the worst news can be overstated, and viewing the same data from multiple angles helps ensure we understand it properly.

[Edited 9/30 to add: At 22.6%, Black Monday in 1987 was actually the worst Dow Day ever if you don’t count “reopening days” after unusual market closures when the markets catch up with events that happened while they were closed. So when was the all-time worst Dow Day ever? Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is not in 1929, though several of the all-time top 10 were in that year. Rather, it was December 12, 1914, when the Dow dropped 24.4% after the markets reopened after being closed entirely for over four months due to the outbreak of World War I. (The markets closed on July 30, two days after Austria-Hungary declared war and a day before Germany did.) That helps put in perspective just how bad October 1987 was, and of course that today’s crisis is also pretty bad even if it hasn’t beaten those prior records, yet.]

The adage, quoted again this week by Bruce Schneier:

The plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”

But lest we enshrine raw data as holy in itself, another perspective:

And the plural of “datum” is not “proof.”