Do they do any surveys on what percentage of the programmer population actually gives a damn about using C++ in new projects, what % plans to make their existing codebase even shittier (or complicated or subjectively beautiful or what have you) by using even more C++ features?
Like my question is who are these standards targeted to? How many of those people exist?
They should stop this nonsense by having one giant meeting and adding everybody's ideas to the standard. Then take a giant sigh and call it C++Done.
Edit: to the -I'm sure respectably intelligent- people with temporary lapses of objectivity that are downvoting without comments - HN is not for passive downvoting of things you don't like, it's for discussing why you disagree.
Nor is it the place for commenting on being downvoted.
C++ is still used widely, in many domains, and there's a lot of code out there that can benefit from incremental improvements to the language and the STL. As for who the standards are targeted to: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Adobe, Yahoo!, major financial institutions, game developers large and small alike, etc., etc. Microsoft claims that 1.5 million C++ devs use Visual Studio, so that's probably where the low estimate for the number of active/semi-active C++ developers would be.
C++ is 3rd place on the latest (July 2017) TIOBE index, behind Java and C.
C++ sits in a niche wherein its competitors have mostly died out with the notable exception of D and few modern languages threaten to replace it other than Rust. It's a low-level language that provides expressitivity that's a step above C but fits in a similar role in environments that are unable to use garbage collection or as the base on which larger systems are built.
After all, you need your fancy virtual machines and modern runtimes to be written in something and there are few choices other than C/C++.
Like my question is who are these standards targeted to? How many of those people exist?
They should stop this nonsense by having one giant meeting and adding everybody's ideas to the standard. Then take a giant sigh and call it C++Done.
Edit: to the -I'm sure respectably intelligent- people with temporary lapses of objectivity that are downvoting without comments - HN is not for passive downvoting of things you don't like, it's for discussing why you disagree.