Draft FAQ: Why does the C++ standard ship every three years?

While Herb Sutter’s answers might be a tad strict I have to admit that I am pleased with the results they’ve been shipping.

C++14 makes a pretty damned good working language for the environment that I work in. If twiddling things forward to C++17 wasn’t a bunch of toolchain wrangling for my own sake more than customer driven, I’d be using it. This leads to reading the reference and thinking “Yay, someday!” as new features trickle out over the three year release cycle.

Over the years between C++98/03 and C++11 new toolchain releases usually revolved around their features. Like people agreeing on template vulgarities or improvements to code generation. Today I tend to be more interested in where the standard is headed, and what runtime library and compiler versions actually implement a given version of C++.

By contrast a very long time ago: it was just a plus if the compiler supported C89 and most of C++….lol