Monthly update (or, what Marshall did in December) There are three main areas where I spend my time. Boost Libc++ WG21, where I am the chair of the Library Working Group (LWG) Boost: December was a big month for boost, and much of the first part of the month was taken up with the release process. I was the release manager for the 1.69.0 release, which went live on 12-December. The final release process was fairly straighforward, with only one release candidate being made/tested - as opposed to the beta, which took three. In any case, we had a successful release, and the I (and other boost developers) are now happily working on features/bug fixes for the 1.70 release - which will occur in March. Libc++: After the WG21 meeting in November, there was a bunch of new functionality to be added to libc++. The list of new features (and their status) can be seen on the libc++ website. My major contributions of new features in December were Consistent Container Erasure, char8_t: A type for UTF-8 characters and strings, and Should Span be Regular?, and a big chunk of [Extending to Calendars and Time Zones](https://wg21.link/P0355R7). This is all pointing towards the January 16th “branch for release”, and for the scheduled March release of LLVM 8.0. As the “code owner” for libc++, I also have to review the contributions of other people to libc++, and evaluate and fix bugs that are reported. That’s a never ending task; there are new contributions ever day. WG21 Being between meetings (November -> February) there was not any special WG21 work to be done in December. There’s an ongoing stream of bug reports, discussion, paper reviews that get done between meetings, and there is a series of papers that I need to finish for the pre-Meeting mailing deadline on 21-January. I have 1 1/2 done, and need to do 3-4 more.

WG21 San Diego Meeting Last week was the fall 2018 WG21 standard committee meeting. It was held in San Diego, which is my hometown. The fact that I helped organize it (while I was working at Qualcomm) had absolutely no affect on the location, I assure you. ;-) This was the largest WG21 meeting ever, with 180 attendees. The last meeting (in Rapperswil, Switzerland) had about 150 attendees, and that was the largest one until now. There were more than 270 papers in the pre-meeting mailing; meaning that people were spending weeks reading papers to prepare for the meeting. Herb Sutter (the convener) has been telling everyone that new papers received after the San Diego meeting were out of scope for C++20, and apparently people took him at his word. This was my first meeting representing the C++ Alliance (though hardly my first overall). The Alliance was well represented, with Rene, Glen, Vinnie, Jon and myself attending. For information about how WG21 is structured, please see isocpp.org. I spent all of my time in LWG, since that’s the group that I chair, and the one that has the most influence over libc++, the library that I work on. The big news from a library POV was that we voted to merge an updated paper based on the Ranges TS into the draft standard; which means that (barring catastrophe) that it will be part of C++20. This was a huge paper, weighing in at 220+ pages. We spent several days in LWG reviewing this (and a bunch of time at previous meetings as well). We also moved a bunch (around 25) of smaller papers; too many to list here. Detailed trip reports can be found around the web: Herb Sutter Reddit The next WG21 meeting is in Kona, HI February 18-23rd.

Initial work on Certify complete It’s been mentioned in my initial blog post that I’d be working on a TLS certificate store abstraction library, with the intent of submitting it for formal review for Boost, at some point in the (hopefully near) future. The initial setup phase (things that every Software Engineer hates) is more or less complete. CI setup was a bit tricky - getting OpenSSL to run with the boost build system on both Windows and Linux (and in the future MacOS) has provided a lot of “fun” thanks to the inherent weirdness of OpenSSL. The test harness currently consists of two test runners that loads certificates from a database (big name for a folder structure stored in git) that has the certificate chains divided into two groups. Chains that will fail due to various reasons (e.g. self-signed certificates, wrong domain name) and ones that will pass (when using a valid certificate store). I’m still working on checking whether the failure was for the expected reason. All the verification is done offline (i.e. no communication with external servers is performed, only chain verification). At this point it looks like I should consider, whether the current design of the verification code is a good approach. Using the verification callback from OpenSSL and asio::ssl is quite an easy way of integrating the platform-specific certificate store API it causes issues with error propagation (transporting a platform-specific error through OpenSSL) and may be fairly slow, because it requires certificates to be reencdoded into the DER format so that they can be fed into the platform-specific API. An alternative to this approach would be load the entire root certificate store, along with CRLs and OCSP configuration into an OpenSSL context. This is potentially a little bit harder to get right but may offer better performance (no reencoding required when veryfing certificate chains) and eliminates the issues related to error handling. Further investigation, as to which approach is better, is required. Don’t forget to star the repository: https://github.com/djarek/certify!

The Alliance is a Gold sponsor for CppCon 2018. This conference is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community. The conference is organized by the C++ community for the community. Attendees enjoy inspirational talks and a friendly atmosphere designed to help individuals learn from each other, meet interesting people, and generally have a stimulating experience.

Damian Jarek joins the Alliance as Staff Engineer. Previously he worked on a number of embedded networking projects for a few major clients. As a Staff Engineer he’ll be working on an open-source companion library for Boost.Beast and Boost.Asio, which will abstract away the platform-specific details of acessing system proxy settings and performing TLS verification of a peer certificate chain using the operating system’s key store.

Marshall Clow joins the Alliance as a Staff Engineer. Previously, he worked at Qualcomm for many years. Most of his time is spent working on libc++, the C++ standard library implementation for LLVM. He is also a member of the C++ standards committee, currently serving as the chair of LWG, the library working group. Marshall has been contributing to the Boost libraries since 2001, and is the author of the Boost.Algorithm library. Furthermore he maintains several other boost libraries, and moderates some of the boost mailing lists. Finally, Marshall has graciously taken on the role of release manager for several Boost versions.

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The Alliance is a Gold sponsor for C++Now 2018. This conference is a gathering of C++ experts and enthusiasts from around the world in beautiful Aspen, Colorado.

A new corporate logo is adopted from the conclusion of a contest on Designhill:

Vinnie Falco joins the Alliance board of directors as president.

René Rivera joins the Alliance board of directors as secretary.

Jon Kalb joins the Alliance board of directors as treasurer.

Glen Joseph Fernandes, a Boost C++ library author, contributor, maintainer, joins as a technical advisor.

The board of directors establishes the Technical Committee, whose job is to inform the CEO and board on all technical matters such as code review, resume review, the quality of papers, and other ongoing work.

The Alliance is now the owner and administrator of the Cpplang Slack Workspace. This workspace is the premiere and most popular community of C++ enthusiasts and professionals from around the globe.

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The Alliance engages Foundation Group, a non-profit formation and compliance services company. Foundation Group delivers a comprehensive 501(c)(3) registration service with a 100% IRS approval rate.

Jens Weller, the organizer and founder of Meeting C++, joins the Alliance as an advisor.

Louis Tatta joins the Alliance in the role of Chief Executive Officer, to oversee and administer the day to day operations of the company and carry out the mission.

The C++ Alliance, Inc. officially incorporates as a California 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The company is administered entirely as a virtual entity with no physical office.

Beast, an HTTP and WebSocket protocol library written in C++11, becomes part of the Boost library collection.