On Tue, 21 Oct 2025 at 19:10, Ville Voutilainen
<ville.voutilainen_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 21 Oct 2025 at 19:06, Tom Honermann <tom_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >
> > On 10/21/25 11:47 AM, Ville Voutilainen wrote:
> > > On Tue, 21 Oct 2025 at 12:20, Timur Doumler <cpp_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> > >> I understand the calls for real deployment experience, but I don't understand how is a Contracts TS or whitepaper would help us get that?
> > > Well, see, it's actually less about what the ship vehicle
> > > semi-magically (I'm intentionally joking here) does. It's about what
> > > chance anyone
> > > has to experiment with the feature before we nail it into an IS.
> > >
> > > Let's face it, it's excruciatingly difficult and therefore unlikely
> > > for so-called third parties to experiment with what we have right now.
> > > You would
> > > need to build a fork-branch compiler, and then deploy that and then do
> > > the actual experimentation. That by nature shuts out quite a bunch of
> > > users.
> >
> > The following is intended as a serious question; I'm not intending to
> > throw shade at other C++26 features.
> >
> > The only implementation of P2996 reflection is in the same state of
> > requiring a fork-branch compiler build of Clang. I'm assuming you
> > consider that implementation sufficient for reflection because I don't
> > see papers calling for its removal due to lack of deployment experience.
> > There has been no deployment experience of P2996 reflection. Why is that
> > sufficient for reflection, but not sufficient for contracts?
>
> Because the impact of reflection on APIs of C++ code in general is
> much smaller, and much more controlled and contained,
> and because the core language part that will be hard to change is
> likewise better-contained and not everywhere-seeping
> like it is for contracts.

I should add, tho, that the above doesn't quite mean that your
assumption is completely correct. And it isn't quite that.
But there are priorities in life, and relative impacts to consider,
and there's a limited amount of time to deal with
all the various nondeployed things that we standardize. Some of them
have proven to be deeper time sinks
than others.