CppCon 2014: Alisdair Meredith "The Committee Experience"

What happens behind the closed doors of the ISO Standard Committee? And just how closed are they? The session collects some anecdotes and relates what it is like to get involved in the process of standardizing C++, from the perspective of someone attending their first meeting – me 10 years ago – to now. We will hear some of the highs and lows along the way to C++11, some misconceptions of what might be involved, and get some idea of what happens during a typical standard meeting, and between. By the end you will have some idea of how the standard itself is actually formed, and hopefully spark the interest of folks who might be interested in getting involved themselves. Alisdair Meredith is a software developer at BloombergLP in New York, and the C++ Standard Committee Library Working Group chair. He has been an active member of the C++ committee for just over a decade, and by a lucky coincidence his first meeting was the kick‑off meeting for the project that would become C++11, and also fixed the contents of the original library TR. He is currently working on the BDE project, BloombergLP's open source libraries that offer a foundation for C++ development, including a standard library implementation supporting the polymorphic allocator model proposed for standardization.