Under the ongoing CppCon 2019 conference, Microsoft announced the opening of the source code of its implementation of the C++ Standard Library (STL), included in the MSVC toolkit and the Visual Studio development environment. The library implements the features described in the current C++14 and C++17 standards and is also evolving towards supporting the upcoming C++20 standard, following changes in the current working draft. The code is licensed under Apache 2.0 with exceptions for binary files, addressing the issue of including runtime libraries in the generated executable files.
The development of this library is planned to be carried out as an open project developed on GitHub, accepting pull requests from third-party developers with fixes and new feature implementations (participation in development requires signing a CLA agreement for transferring ownership rights to the submitted code). It is noted that moving STL development to GitHub will help Microsoft clients track the development process, experiment with the latest changes, and assist in reviewing incoming enhancement requests.
The opening of the code will also allow the community to use ready-made implementations of features from new standards in other projects. For example, the license for the code is chosen in such a way as to enable code sharing with the library from the LLVM project. STL and libc++ differ in their internal representation of data structures, but if desired, libc++ developers can port the functionality of interest from STL (for example, charconv), or both projects collectively can develop some innovations. The exceptions added to the Apache license remove the requirement to mention the use of the original product when delivering compiled binary files to end users that utilize STL.
One of the key objectives of the project is complete compliance with specification requirements, ensuring high performance, ease of use (debugging, diagnostics, error detection tools), and compatibility at the source code and ABI levels with previous releases of Visual Studio 2015/2017. Among the areas that Microsoft is not interested in developing are porting to other platforms and adding non-standard extensions.
KĂ€lla: opennet.ru
