Is open-std.org the official website for C++11 standard documentation?

Question

This may sounds a dumb question but: Is the below link the official finalized c++11 standard? (or at least the latest version) n3337

It is my first time to open-std.org and I am not sure whether this is the official website for holding C++ standards.

Just double checking for sure. (The last time I referenced an unfamiliar website (cplusplus.com) was not a pleasant experience though.)

[cppreference.com](http://en.cppreference.com) is a much better reference than cplusplus.com (though not source of the _'official'_ standard). — πάντα ῥεῖ, Jun 17 '14 at 16:34
The [Where do I find the current C or C++ standard documents?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/81656/where-do-i-find-the-current-c-or-c-standard-documents) is probably the canonical thread for this, the main answer by Loki is kept up to date. — Shafik Yaghmour, Jun 17 '14 at 16:41
@πάντα ῥεῖ, Agreed. it is my current main reference except for searching is not very convinient. Do you know any good method to search through it, say, for a specific api function. — modeller, Jun 17 '14 at 16:42

score 20 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 17 '14 at 16:31

You are not alone with this problem.

Which is why not too long ago isocpp.org was created which, among other things, answers precisely this question.

Quoting from the site:

Where To Get the Current Standard

Purchase the official standard (US$30). You can purchase the official standard for US$30 at the ANSI Store. (Note: The standard at that link is technically identical to ISO 14882, just with a different cover page; each national body ratifies the ISO standard as its own national standard, and so this document’s cover page officially lists it as U.S. standard INCITS/ISO/IEC 14882-2012 – Programming Language C++.)

Download the January 2012 working draft (free). Except only for the final standards/reports, all C++ committee documents are freely publicly available, including all working drafts, many of which closely approximate the published standard. The January 2012 working draft contains the C++11 standard plus minor editorial changes.

Where To Get Working Drafts

Download a PDF of the current working draft (free). This is the easiest way to get the latest prebuilt PDF. However, you can also…

Get working drafts at GitHub (free), plus version history, diffs, and more! As of November 2011, the LaTeX source of the draft standard is being actively maintained publicly at GitHub. Check out the repo to get the current snapshot, or any previous version in the history.

Note that the links in the quote might be outdated at the time of you reading this, while the actual page on isocpp.org should always be up to date.

Thumb up for very detailed explanation. It seems opened a rabbit hole for the standards. — modeller, Jun 17 '14 at 16:41
ISO sells copies too, but for 198 CHF (that's over $200 in USD, apparently). If you want an official final version, ANSI's a much better deal. — cHao, Jun 17 '14 at 19:42

score 18 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 17 '14 at 17:36

The officially finalized standard isn't free. You can buy it from your national standardization organization. You can probably buy it for relatively few dollars from ANSI.

The open-std web site is used for the internal standardization work. The papers published there can be very close or even identical to the standard document but they are not the official ISO documents.

There is isocpp as an entry point to the group standardizing C++. This page doesn't provide the official C++ standard either; the official source for any ISO standard is the national standardization organization. However, when choosing a suitable version of the working paper from open-std.org you'll get something fairly close. For example, the document you pointed to is sufficiently close to the C++11 standard to be useful for most uses.

Is open-std.org the official website for C++11 standard documentation?

2 Answers2