[Question] Introduce a community

[ShalokShalom]

Hi there. I have found myself repeatedly longing for a community.

The C++ communities are overall very dismissive of Cpp2 and don't want, or can't answer any questions. I created a Cpp2 Discord room, and I am open to any other form of communication.

[alvarogalloc]

Could you send another invitation? This one expired :(

[ShalokShalom]

Since very few people showed interest, I did not do any further promotion.
Still, here is your link: https://discord.gg/hDfB5YeqfH
Sad, that the C++ community has so less interest about cpp2. And even sadder, that the cpp2 community has less interest about being a group.

[MaxSagebaum]

Currently, there is one place where the community can meet. This is the github page. People can also ask questions here. The problem with opening a discord server is, that it is just another discord you have to check/get messages from. This splits up the community and might not be very helpful. That is just my opinion.

[ShalokShalom]

To be honest, that is quite naive, when checking the facts.

Every single other programming language that I follow (a good dozen niche languages), does have a Discord, other community channels, or both.

And they mostly full with responsible people.

I have never experienced a language community so void of people and active engagement.

Here, you don't get an answer for weeks, and its does not feel dynamic or engaging to me. 🙁

Cpp2 is not "on GitHub" - it appears like it is not anywhere at all, barely hovering between life and death.

At the most, it lingers in some sort of lingo.

Neither alive, nor dead.

And the current strategy seems to be to avoid building a community on purpose.

Maybe because you are scared the language is too unfinished, or that the Cpp fanatics could get mad about it, when it becomes more popular.

Probably a mix between both.
But man, this isn't working.

Not only are there almost no people to talk to about Cpp2, its often even hard to get an answer on Github itself.

There is almost no community - and by that, what community do you wanna split?

5 people who write on Github?

[MaxSagebaum]

I do not know where all the negativity comes from. cppfront is a project by Herb and a lot of people have invested some time into it. There is currently no one, as far as I know, who works on cppfront for a fixed amount of time per week.

Also recently, Herb did not had much time to work on cppfront and he is still the main person behind this project.

I presume, that community engagement will rise once again Herb has more time again.

I hope this helps to understand the current status of cppfront.

[ShalokShalom]

There is no hate? I just observe that you expect community engagement without a proper platform for one.

That cannot work. 🙃

[gregmarr]

@ShalokShalom I think the point that you are missing is that Cpp2 is a personal experimental project by Herb Sutter, who is also the convener of the C++ standards committee. Notice the personal experimental project part of this. It is not an official project by the C++ standards committee, and is most definitely not a project by his employer. He has changed employers in the last year in fact. He is also currently working on an official white paper for the C++ standards committee related to identifying and preventing undefined behavior. We are not expecting community engagement at this time, for the reasons listed above.

In your very first post you said "I am open to any other form of communication" but then dismissed Max's information on what other forms of communication are currently being used for the very little amount of current communication.

[ShalokShalom]

I do communicate with you, or not?

And precisely because its a one man show, should the community form a strong connection, to shoulder some of the work that falls otherwise on his shoulders, or to the ground.

You are doing as if every open source community is based on companies - the vast majority of open source projects happen to be rooted in one man shows.

How does that mean, we should form no community?

Do you think there is maybe a reason, for the very little amount of current communication - as you put it yourself?

Why is there so little communication?

Maybe because there is no dedicated, suitable platform for this kind of communication?

[gregmarr]

I do communicate with you, or not?

Yes.

Do you think there is maybe a reason, for the very little amount of current communication - as you put it yourself?

Yes, there is, because it is a personal experimental project and the person that owns it is not working on it much right now because of other constraints on his time.

Maybe because there is no dedicated, suitable platform for this kind of communication?

There is, in this repo, in the Discussions, Issues, and Pull Requests.

[hsutter]

Hi! I appreciate the sentiment and interest.

As others have said, this is my own personal project and this repo is the place for any community there may be. In fact, it already has way more community than I initially intended because I originally didn't mean to even allow people to open Issues here, only to share my code and progress. But then I noticed people were opening PRs (which I couldn't disable) to report Issues, so I bowed to the will of the Internet and enabled Issues. 😅 As it is, I can't keep up with all Issues, though I've tried to triage and keep up with as many as I can.

Thanks again for your interest, and for understanding.

[ShalokShalom]

Thanks a lot for your feedback. Personally, I don't see a project thriving without a community.
You miss feedback, you miss contributions, you miss engagement.

So even at the point when this language is considered to be 'ready' - there will be no interest in it anymore as people may have moved on to other languages.

I wish you all the best 👍🏻