C++20 Making Progress On Modules, Memory Model Updates

This past week was an ISO C++ committee meeting in San Diego, which happened to be their largest meeting ever, and they managed to accomplish a lot in drafting more planned changes around the C++20 language update.

Herb Sutter of the ISO C++ standards committee has written another excellent trip summary of all that was discussed pertaining to this next major update for C++20. Some of the highlights from the C++20 discussions in San Diego included:

- The Ranges concept was adopted for C++20.

- The Concepts "convenience" notation was approved as well.

- Many constexpr additions for C++20.

- Updates were made around the C++ memory model, including better support for GPU memory.

- Working towards better Unicode support with a new chart8_t type for UTF-8 characters/strings.

- Smart pointer creation with default initialization.

- Work on C++ modules is making good progress and they hope to have it approved still for C++20.

- Work on coroutines was voted on in San Diego but they didn't get enough votes, but still might happen in time for C++20.

- The networking TS will likely be firmed up for C++23, not C++20.

- There is new work around improving C++ for machine learning with optimizations for graph programming and other improvements.

Those wanting to learn a lot more about the latest C++20 talk can read Herb Sutter's excellent post on his blog.