Not about the language exactly, so maybe not fair game, but: how did you all find yourselves joining ISO? And maybe more generally, what's the path for someone like a regular old software engineer to come to participate in the standardization process for something as significant and ubiquitous as the C programming language?
Joining the committee requires you to be a member of your country's national body group (in the US, that's INCITS) and attend at least some percentage of the official committee meetings, and that's about it. So membership is not difficult, but it can be expensive. Many committee members are sponsored by their employers for this reason, but there's no requirement that you represent a company.
I joined the committees because I have a personal desire to reduce the amount of time it takes developers to find the bugs in their code, and one great way to reduce that is to design features to make harder to write the bugs in the first place, or to turn unbounded undefined behavior into something more manageable. Others join because they have specific features they want to see adopted or want to lend their domain expertise in some area to the committee.
Related to that: C++ standards body seems to be quite open allowing non-members to participate (outside official votes, while respecting them when looking for consensus) is it just due to my limited observation or is the C group less open? Any plans in that regard?
Most of us on the committee would like to see more participation from other experts. The committee's mailing list should be open even to non-members. Attendance by non-members at meetings might require an informal invitation (I imagine a heads up to the convener should do it).
I think that's right. These days, much of the discussion occurs through study subgroups (like the floating-point guys) and the committee e-mailing list.
I would love to see more open interactions between the broader C community and the WG14 committee. One of the plans I am currently working on is an update to the committee's webpage to at least make it more obvious as to how you can get involved. The page isn't ready to go live yet, but will hopefully be in shape soon.
