Preemptive note for those who are concerned that ISO charges
money for the final official text of the standard [...] the
final text where ISO asserts copyright.
Why are ISO standards copyrighted, and sold for money? Isn't the ISO mostly funded by member nations? How is this helping to promote the actual use of these standards, at all?
ISO standards cost money to develop, publish and distribute. Someone has to pay. The current system whereby users are requested to pay for the standards they use, not only sustains the development process but also, very importantly, ensures that the balance of independent vs. government, private vs. public interests can be maintained."
Whining about publishing/distribution costs for standards in 2011 is laughable. The only excuse for printing virtually anything these days is small quick reference cards, invoices and packing lists (mostly for shipping), and labels.
Most of the people that actually work on the standards are paid for their work by companies in the relevant field.
If the organization was running anywhere close to correctly, their costs would be limited to typesetting, some organizational work for meetings, and bandwidth. All of which could be trivially borne by modest contributions of the governments and corporations involved.
You've never bought an ISO standard, have you. They explain the reason for the costs on the website. When you buy a personal copy, each page will have a footer that reads something like, "Licensed to Bob Smith for Bob Smith's use only." Group licenses cost much more.
Anyway, this is off-topic as all ISO standards cost money and have for a long time now. I'm glad C++ has a new standard. The boost additions are great and make C++ even better than it was.
So you're suggesting that it's off-topic to question whether ISO should be charging for standards docs on the publication day of one of the most widely anticipated standards ever? Just because all other standards cost money?
I know VS2011 already supports some of the C++11 specification, and it looks like GCC has got a number of those features implemented for some time now. Anyone know how long it might take for people to sync up to the spec completely?
How long did it take with c++03? I remember I started seriously messing around with C++ around 01/02 and I noticed with every new version of VS then that things would just randomly change every few years and took a while before it became uniform.
Wasn't there a recent Sutter talk that mentioned that almost all of the spec is already supported in VC? I may be mistaken but that was the impression I got...
They still don't support initializer lists and variadic templates.
non-static data member initializers as well, but they're more of a nicety. Definitely was one of the nice bonuses whenever I did any c# stuff. Especially when you have to overload constructors so you can avoid massive initialization lists.
