Hi,

CERN is now a member of the C++ standards committee.

The LHC experiments and CERN itself use and have created a C++ code base of an estimated 50 million lines of code. Tens years, thousands of developers. About 10,000 people using C++ connected at CERN: users and staff. Given those numbers it makes sense to have opinions on the language features, and to share these opinions with the body that defines the language - just like Fermilab does already.

When Bjarne Stroustrup visited us in 2009 he tried to convince us to join, to increase the representation of the users' view on C++: many of the committee members are compiler vendors (GC, MSVC, clang,...) or library developers (boost).

CERN hasn't actually done anything yet: a few of us need to contribute a bit of our time, go to meetings, read proposals and comment on them. One of the first actions we are allowed to carry out is to vote on the Final Draft of the upcoming C++ standard. This happens in the context of the Swiss Association for Standardization (SNV); they have to cast their vote within the ISO system, and we are an ingredient of defining the SNV's vote. Complex, but not nearly as complex as the voting that happens within the C++ Standards Committee - that's probably the topic of a separate blog entry, once I have witnessed it live :-)

If you have a CERN account you can access the current topics (proposals that are worked on etc) at the CERN TWiki. For now you can download the standard's draft - but watch out for the (weird) copy restrictions we have to obey.

By the way, being a member of the SNV gives us access to all standards within the "computing" context (because we are a member of that national committee). The CERN library is currently cataloging these standards; to make them available for download. The biggest one will probably be the >3500 pages of the POSIX "Base Specifications". Just in case your next vacation is boring and you always wanted to know what e.g. cp is really supposed to do :-)

Cheers,