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At the ongoing CppCon 2019 conference, Microsoft announced announced the opening of the source code for its implementation of the C++ Standard Library (STL), which is part of the MSVC toolkit and the Visual Studio development environment. The library implements features described in the current standards C++14 and C++17 and is also evolving to support the upcoming C++20 standard, following changes in the current working draft. The code is open is licensed under Apache 2.0 with exceptions for binary files, addressing the issue of including runtime libraries in the resulting executables.

The development of this library is planned to be conducted as an open project on GitHub, accepting pull requests from third-party developers with fixes and new feature implementations (participation in development requires signing a CLA agreement on the transfer of property rights for the submitted code). It is noted that moving the STL development to GitHub will help Microsoft customers track the development progress, experiment with the latest changes, and assist in reviewing incoming requests for new features.

The opening of the code will also allow the community to use existing implementations of features from new standards in other projects. For example, the licensing of the code is chosen in such a way as to enable sharing code with the library libc++ from the LLVM project. STL and libc++ differ in their internal representation of data structures, but if desired, libc++ developers can port desired functionality from STL (such as charconv), or both projects can collaboratively develop some innovations. The added exceptions in the Apache license remove the requirement to mention the use of the original product when delivering compiled binary files to end users that were created with STL.

Among the key goals of the project are full compliance with specification requirements, ensuring high performance, usability (debugging, diagnostics, error detection tools), and compatibility at the source code and ABI levels with previous releases of Visual Studio 2015/2017. Areas that Microsoft is not interested in developing include porting to other platforms and adding non-standard extensions.

Source: opennet.ru