I wouldn’t characterize that group as “the community”. True there are a lot of such people, mostly clustered In the game industry where superstition is rife.
Take a look At C++ (or c++ 20!) as if it were a brand new language you’d never seen before and forgetting that it’s name includes “c”. That language is a pretty clean, expressive and straightforward language IMHO. I like programming in it.
It’s not claiming it’s unicorns farting rainbows, but it’s definitely pretty good.
If the community wasn't busy discussing those issues, and constexpr of all things, we would already have reflection, with a concurrency and networking story that isn't put to shame for what Java 5 already had, let alone in modern managed languages.
Yeah, if everyone plays ball, it might come in 5 years from now, assuming C++23 gets done on time, plus the compiler support stabilization.
Right now SG14 seems to drive some of those decisions, at least from outside.
Those are important issues and people who care about them work on them and come to committee meetings. There is less consensus on the concurrency and networking side which I also find frustrating but as I’m not pushing those balls forward I can’t complain. I do think at least that the direction they’re moving in is a fruitful one.
The standard can move quickly: consider formatted output which lingered unchanged with a broken model but was rapidly reformed when someone with a good model and implementation was encouraged to come forward. Admittedly a smaller topic than concurrency or networking!
Right now, the way I see it, I rather help the managed languages I work on reach the point where binding to C++ is kind of last option when nothing else helps.
The other language communities manage to drive language progress over the Internet, which apparently ISO has yet to get in touch how it goes.
C++ does this as well, for example with boost, where several things that entered the standard got their start. And the format example I gave. It’s the ISO blessing that is complex, but also acts as a forcing function tromtrhnto make new features as orthogonal as possible. Sure, it’s not to everybody’s taste, but you don’t need to follow ISO if you don’t wish to.
Take a look At C++ (or c++ 20!) as if it were a brand new language you’d never seen before and forgetting that it’s name includes “c”. That language is a pretty clean, expressive and straightforward language IMHO. I like programming in it.
It’s not claiming it’s unicorns farting rainbows, but it’s definitely pretty good.