C++26 is done! — Trip report: March 2026 ISO C++ standards meeting (London Croydon, UK)

News flash: C++26 is done! 🎉 On Saturday, the ISO C++ committee completed technical work on C++26 in (partly) sunny London Croydon, UK. We resolved the remaining international comments on the C++26…

Sutter’s Mill
Biggest open question is whether the small changes to the module system in this standard will actually lead to more widespread adoption

The best thing the C++ WG could do is to spend an entire release cycle working on modules and packaging.

It's nice to have new features, but what is really killing C++ is Cargo. I don't think a new generation of developers are going to be inspired to learn a language where you can't simply `cargo add` whatever you need and instead have to go through hell to use a dependency.

Agreed, arcane cmake configs and or bash build scripts are genuinely off-putting. Also cpp "equivalents" of cargo which afaik are conan and vcpkg are not default and required much more configuring in comparison with cargo. Atleast this was my experience few years ago.

It's fundamentally different; Rust entirely rejects the notion of a stable ABI, and simply builds everything from source.

C and C++ are usually stuck in that antiquated thinking that you should build a module, package it into some libraries, install/export the library binaries and associated assets, then import those in other projects. That makes everything slow, inefficient, and widely dangerous.

There are of course good ways of building C++, but those are the exception rather than the standard.

I would suggest importing binaries and metadata is going to be faster than compiling all the source for that.