Maintainer priorities

[StephanTLavavej]

This is a quick summary of what the STL maintainers are working on.

High priority

• Review PR backlog
• Contribution Guidelines

Nice to have

• Modules:
  • Modules Bug Bash II
  • Modules guide with "%VCToolsInstallDir%\modules\std.ixx"
• Record bugfixes in Tracking Issue for constexpr Containers: P0784, P0980, P1004 #1566
• Write a blog post now that flat_meow has landed, talking about library-only completeness, other work like vectorization and the sleep/wait fixes, plan for compiler-dependent features, start of 26 work, and ongoing modules work

[diablodale]

Hi @StephanTLavavej, checking in on the perplexing #948 of what() exception signature. And it seems this particular fyi issue is outdated.

[StephanTLavavej]

I think we could technically fix #948 at any time (we've gotten a lot more comfortable with what kind of changes we can get away with, without breaking ABI, and a lot more comfortable/aggressive about making changes with significant impact). However, I continue to be concerned that the source breaking impact of #948 will be titanic, and I haven't had enough spare capacity to be confident I can handle the fallout / complaints. Fairly recently we've pushed through the constexpr mutex constructor change which generated a lot of discontent, the Win7/8/8.1 support removal, and now major removals of deprecated features are checked in and waiting to ship in the MSVC Build Tools 14.51 for which we will surely receive complaints even though they've been deprecated for years in most cases. Even with a macro escape hatch, it seems like marking what() as noexcept will go break a lot of exception classes, especially in third-party libraries which are the hardest to get fixed up throughout the ecosystem. If I had several other maintainers to help, I'd be more confident in pulling it off, but at the moment I am the only maintainer able to spend time on the STL, so if I had to fight what() noexcept fires all day, other work on the repo would slow to a crawl.

Now that we've announced the New release cadence and support lifecycle for Microsoft C++ Build Tools, 14.54 expected Q4 2027 will be the next Long-Term Support release. I think I'll want to see how disruptive the feature removals in 14.51 are, before deciding whether we can tackle what() noexcept in 14.52, or if it would need to wait until 14.55.

Yes, I haven't been keeping this issue (#4700) updated, partially because I didn't think anyone was still looking at it 😹

[diablodale]

@StephanTLavavej, I follow all you wrote, agree what() noexcept is not a P1/breaking, and get your team's caution. 👍 My #948 subscribe will keep me in loop for your approach (I'm avoiding doing that here) when you have bandwidth to return to it.