What's not mentioned in the announcement (at least based on a quick skim) is that EDG the company is winding down, which is likely the reason why they're open sourcing the front end.
Not really sad. They are getting older, worked for themselves doing presumably what they wanted their entire career, now they are done. They could have built the company up, instead it has been common knowledge for close to 10 years they were going to retire 'any day now.'
Building a company is so fraught with pitfalls, probably realized at some point that their income was good enough that they could safely work towards retiring at some point in the future without problems and drama.
> John was the most vocal person pointing out technical problems with the feature; the committee decided it did not agree and standardized the feature anyway over his and EDG’s sustained objections; and then instead of sitting back and saying “we told you so,” EDG ended up being the only company in the world who ever implemented the feature! To add a sense of proportion: It took the same team longer to implement just the C++98 export template feature than to implement a compiler front-end for the entire Java language. But John and EDG went and did it, to support the committee’s consensus decision… only to have the committee remove export template again a few years later, because John and EDG had been right about the feature’s problems. That’s a model of solid professional behavior.
Yes, but no reflection on the burn out this causes for the c++ community?
EDG has been consistently the most vocal opposers of anything that goes in the language, and in recent years had stopped keeping up. The `export` thign was an exception.
Sorry, but that's nonsense. We've supported plenty of features. We've also occasionally been the first to implement them. In recent years, we spearheaded reflection, supported, first-implemented a bunch of constant-evaluation features (consteval etc.), and supported and first-shipped C++23 "explicit this".
jabl · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Design_Group" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison_Design_Group ref 9: <a href="https://herbsutter.com/2025/11/10/trip-report-november-2025-iso-c-standards-meeting-kona-usa/" rel="nofollow">https://herbsutter.com/2025/11/10/trip-report-november-2025-...
whobre · · focus · HN ↗
splicebot · · focus · HN ↗
whizzter · · focus · HN ↗
MFHava · · focus · HN ↗
vlovich123 · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, but no reflection on the burn out this causes for the c++ community?
watinthedeutsch · · focus · HN ↗
daveedvdv · · focus · HN ↗
fg137 · · focus · HN ↗