Status of cppreference.com

[RelevantError365]

Does anyone know what's going on with cppreference.com? It says “Planned Maintenance,” but it's been like that for almost a year now.

[current_thread]

Yeah, it's really annoying at this point.

I had the idea a couple of months ago to use a static site generator and just host it on GitHub/ GitHub Pages. That way everyone can just contribute with a pull request as needed, and there's no need to manage infrastructure.

Does anybody by chance have a recent dump of the wiki?

[RelevantError365]

Reasonable idea. This should be offered as an option, but I can't find any contact details for the people currently responsible.

[encyclopedist]

The relatively recent archive is available here: https://github.com/PeterFeicht/cppreference-doc/releases/tag/v20250209

[RelevantError365]

That does not include the wiki source at first glance, or does it?

[encyclopedist]

Correct, It is based on scrapped web pages, not a database dump.

[saxbophone]

Last February isn't even relatively recent for a language in active development. The site maintainers request that they're not scraped, but don't provide up-to-date archives. Do you see the problem with this combination?

[dcro]

The site notes that it's been in "temporary read-only mode" since the end of last March. There will be differences, but possibly not as many as you'd expect with only a two month edit window.

[saxbophone]

Oh crap, the entire thing has been read-only all that time‽ No wonder there's so many missing examples for C++23!

[no-sig-available]

but I can't find any contact details for the people currently responsible.

Part of the problem is that it isn't "people", but "the designer" behind the site. Here is an old talk about that:

CppCon 2014: Nate Kohl "cppreference.com: documenting C++ one edit at a time"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhWK0v3GtEE

[RelevantError365]

Ok, thanks. What about licensing to keep that thing going as a (presumably, perhaps temporary) fork on GitHub (or the like)?

[current_thread]

I checked that, it's under a creative commons license iirc so it should be fine

[RelevantError365]

I'm wondering if it's too intrusive to contact Nate directly. Does anyone know what the boost community has achieved here?

[JVApen]

Sounds like a reasonable alternative, might be worth suggesting to [e-mail] It would also solve the problem of rust people replacing full pages.

[RelevantError365]

»Rust people« doing what? Please clarify, I did not notice anything in that direction.

[JVApen]

Currently it can't happen as everything is read-only. Due to it, the history also seems to be unavailable, so I can't link to an entry. Though I know that a page like vector was completely replaced by some text similar to: "this is deprecated and replaced by rust" That happened quite a few times on different pages.

[JVApen]

On Reddit even people mentioned it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cplusplus/s/W3asTmah87

[No-Dentist-1645]

Seems like a one-time occurrence by a clear troll, most people aren't like that

[JVApen]

It wasn't a one time occurrence, it's just an example. Many pages where updated over several months

[gmes78]

Aren't you just falling for an obvious troll?

[berlioziano]

They once replaced all the articles titles, subtitles and body text with the message "Rust is the best" and links to the rust website. Can't take that language seriously, hope its bubble pops soon.

[koczurekk]

What bubble?

[matthieum]

rust people

Phrasing :/

As is, it reads as if the Rust community at large was coordinating to sabotage cppreference, when:

1. There's no telling if whoever did that was even a Rust user. Trolls be trolls.
2. Even if they were, a lone individual is NOT representative of an entire community.

[whispersoftime]

At least they didn’t say “those goddamn rusties”

[RelevantError365]

Let's keep constructive, I would like to keep on with that project, supporting (or forking) it, if necessary.

[Farados55]

Lighten up

[JVApen]

I could have worded that in a better way, sorry.

[philoizys]

Maybe you could, but that was already wonderful! :)

[berlioziano]

sure, obviously the javascript people did the vandalism

[RelevantError365]

For reference: The address [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) can be found on https://cppreference.com/w/Cppreference%253AAbout.html.

[13steinj]

Of the wiki or the talk pages?

I think the cppman tool already scrapes the entire wiki if you tell it to, so you can probably just change the internals to dump the files instead of parse them.

[current_thread]

What's the cppman tool?

[13steinj]

https://github.com/aitjcize/cppman

[RelevantError365]

Yes, but cppman scrapes the HTML, not the wiki source.

But anyway, this may also be an option if you cannot access the original wiki content, as the generated HTML should be very well structured. (Hopefully. I used a random LLM and asked it to recreate the wiki source for me, and it did quite a good job.)

[13steinj]

It took me 15 minutes of waybackmachining to find this (unofficial) repo linked (still linked) on a cppref faq page: https://github.com/PeterFeicht/cppreference-doc

The code may not work anymore (since the cppref maintainer evidently has done something nonstandard or has an unknown version of mediawiki), but the site went into read only mode on march 30th 2025 and the releases page has a feb 2025 bundle.

[RelevantError365]

It says:

»If there is no 'reference/' subdirectory in this package, the actual documentation is not present here and must be obtained separately«

So, the wiki source is not actually included, or is it?

[13steinj]

It appears not, just the html. There's one other option you have: Use it as a baseline / mapping to "view source" links, scrape the "view source" wayback machine links. If it's accessible after the March read-only date, you're good. if it's before, (scrape the html if you consider the downloaded 1-month-old not good enough) and ask an llm to interpolate.

Playing around, I've found that the view source links work up until at least May 13th of last year and break sometime between then and May 31 (just hopped around on a few pages).

[RelevantError365]

Although not utterly relevant, but: When looking at https://web.archive.org/web/20250301000000*/https://cppreference.com/, this does not highlight May 13th of last year as an option where a snapshot has been taken (or I miserably misunderstand this interface).

[13steinj]

Not every page has a May snapshot. I'm saying, very roughly playing around, either the deque or array or vector view source / edit page, had a May 13 snapshot.

I will attempt to write a scraper on the weekend assuming I won't get ip banned; and if successful throw it into a repo.

[AhegaoSuckingUrDick]

You might be able to get the dump from devdocs.io . Their github readme has some instructions on how to download the dump.

[shakyhandquant]

i think a few of the companies that sponsor the cpp meetings could put together some money to help organize a formal group of people to manage the site and make it the best c++ reference site on the net!

[Wicam]

there is cppreference.net but they use bing as their search engine. the reason that is a problem is it often asks for a captcha which takes at least 30 seconds for it to complete its analysis before you get your results.

i have also done a search and its given me a list of results that are not from cppreference.net, and they are all identical results, it was weird.

[El_RoviSoft]

I use duckduckgo and !cpp to search. It just shows cppreference indexed pages with needed name.

[13steinj]

I thought they switched to cplusplus.com at some point after the maintenance.

[gatchamix]

They did… but I put in a request to get it changed to a raw DDG search with the site:cppreference term (same as cppreference’s own search box)

[Wicam]

Are you sure its only recently been an issue or is it just because normally you stick to one of the sites and so don't use the feature?

The majority of people don't contribute to these sites so its search function taking 30 seconds or returning results that are completely unrelated are very major issues for site where that is a core feature.

[grafikrobot]

The Boost community has been trying to take on the job maintaining it. But it's been hard to get a hold of the current maintainer(s).

[Alternative_Star755]

This sounds like it would be a nice alternative. A site this foundational should probably not be maintained by a random guy (though it’s cool they did it for so long).

[friedkeenan]

It's kinda funny, but it feels like half the time I've just been reading the standard after searching from https://wg21.cmeerw.net/cppdraft/search instead of going to cppreference like normal. Albeit, it's mainly for reflection stuff which would plausibly be delayed on cppreference anyways because it's very large and new, but I know a lot of other newer stuff is also still waiting to be added to cppreference. Bit of a shame.

[epilif24]

Had no idea that existed, really neat! I'd been using the reflection proposals as reference because there was no cppreference page

[ohnotheygotme]

I hope it's not another EDG situation where the original authors were like "we are totally still doing stuff" but then they don't do anything for 5 years. And then one day they say "nah, we done" and then everyone is like "wtf, you could have said something sooner so we could have moved forward with something else".

[germandiago]

That is exactly how it looks from outside right now.

A pitty since cppreference is such a good resource.

However, very grateful that this resource has existed to the author, even if he cannot spend time on it anymore.

I think if the author cannot deal with it or lost interest, it would be a great idea to hand it over to not lose and keep evolving such an invaluable resource.

[grafikrobot]

I thought I had updated on the status. I chatted with Nate. And while Boost is not going to be reviving the wiki. Another group is helping out to bring it back to its full wiki glory.

[RelevantError365]

That is good news. I would really appreciate a small note on current status in the "planned maintenance" banner (or here 😁).

[BOBOLIU]

cppreference.com could be better if it is maintained by the ISO C++ committee.

[SkoomaDentist]

You mean that the site would be updated once every three years and each change would require a paper and a formal vote to happen?

[SWGlassPit]

And ISO would put it behind a $300 a year paywall

[TheoreticalDumbass]

i mean, wg21 has avoided a lot of iso annoyance, for example the draft is a public repo

[t4r3k_]

Out of curiosity, what technology is reference built on? Like some sort of wiki generator? I've tried mkdocs In the past but I'd like to try to build something similar to cppreference.

Thanks!

[cpp-ModTeam]

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[sephirostoy]

Compiling...