Looks like they're doing what they should've done some time ago and what helped many competing languages get ahead. Between that and recent standards, C++ programming might get really interesting again. Even I might take a stab at it eventually.
Even though I hardly use it at work (JVM/.NET), it was my to go to language after Turbo Pascal. So I still enjoy following and dabbling with it.
Some of the issues C++ had were:
- C compilers were still catching up with ANSI C89 and it was a mess
- C++ being in the process of becoming standardise was even worse. It was quite hard to find out what were the working common features between compiler vendors, specially in terms of semantics
- The C culture that prevented many nice frameworks to succeed, because they were too high level, hence why MFC is such a thin wrapper over Win32.
- Lack of standard ABI in an age people only shared binary libraries.
C++14 and C++17 look really nice, but I doubt C++ will recover its place at the enterprise, beyond performance critical libraries/modules.
Which C++17 feature are you referring to? Modules?