[cpp-threads] Current status

[Boehm, Hans]

As you may have seen, the C++ standards committee voted out a
"registration draft" for C++0x at the Portland meeting.  This included 6
placeholder entries for things that are not currently in the working
draft, but are expected to be in the standard.  Four of those fall in
the general category of thread support.  Details are in the official
minutes at

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2006/n2110.html

We are still soliciting further readers and comments for Clark Nelson's
and my C++ sequencing proposal (N2052, or even better, the currently
unofficial revision).  I think there is currently a reasonable consensus
that this is the right direction, though it does leave some of the
stickier issues related to atomics to a later library specification.
However, there was concern (shared by Clark and me, I think) that not
enough experts had read and understood the proposal to catch potential
problems, and that it is not an easy document for most people to read.
That currently appears to be the sticking point in advancing this into
the working draft.  To hopefully somewhat improve matters, I submitted
another purely explanatory document (N2138) after the Portland mailing.
All of these are now conspicuously referenced by the page at
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/c++mm/ .

However, none of this helps unless we can get people to actually read
the above.  If you do, please send me or the list a note, even if it's
"I read it and it looks OK", or "I tried to read it and got lost at ...
".  In the latter case, I'd really appreciate it if you could also look
at N2138, and see if that helps. 

We have gotten very useful comments from a few people, and those are of
course greatly appreciated, and should be reflected in the current
revision, even if I've sometimes been late to respond.

Thanks.

Hans