[cfe-dev] RFC: Plan for removing components from namespace std::experimental

[C Bergström via cfe-dev]

I think regardless of who may or may not be using *experimental* stuff
there shouldn't be a level of guaranteed stability. As the name
implies it's not stable. It's a vehicle for testing things and
prototype implementations that can't make it into main. Show me
another project where experimental == guaranteed stability

On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 4:22 AM, Marshall Clow via cfe-dev
<cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> As part of the work on C++17, WG21 released a series of "Technical
> Specifications", (TS) which added proposed new features to the standard
> library. These were all defined in the namespace 'std::experimental' (and
> namespaces inside of that).
>
> Then, much of these features were merged into the main standard, and became
> part of namespace 'std'.  Libc++ now has two implementations of several of
> these, and they are diverging (because changes were made to the ones in the
> main standard, but not to the ones in the TS.
>
> In the long run, I would like to remove the TS versions of these features
> from libc++ - since there are "better" versions in the main standard now.
> However, since people are using these, I don't think yanking them w/o
> warning is the right thing to do.
>
> So, I'm proposing a new policy, and a timetable:
>
> One year.
>
> One year after we ship a LLVM release that supports a new C++ standard, we
> will remove all the features that are in the 'experimental' namespace that
> are implemented in the new standard).
>
> Applying this policy to C++17,  we get:
>
> LLVM 5.0 will support C++17.
>
> So, for LLVM 7.0, we will remove (at least) the following features from
> libc++
> * std::experimental::filesystem
> * std::experimental::optional
> * std::experimental::any
> * std::experimental::string_view
> * the searchers (std::experimental::boyer_moore, etc)
> * std::experimental::random_shuffle
>
> and probably other things...
>
> Comments?
>
> -- Marshall
>
>
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