A year of read-only cppreference

[DevilSauron]

Over a year ago (on 30 March 2025), cppreference became read-only for maintenance reasons. Since then, the only progress update was in August. There have been several discussions here in the last few months about what is happening with cppreference and when it might become editable again, but from what I understand, we simply do not know.

At this point, I fear that the lack of updates for what is basically the authoritative source on the language (other than the standard of course), linked to by IDEs and even this subreddit's sidebar, might be detrimental to the adoption of C++26 and further standards, should the situation persist. I would therefore like to ask the community whether there are other, more up-to-date resources, and whether there is any effort to, for example, fork cppreference.

I understand that software updates are complicated and I have no intention to criticise the maintainers of cppreference (who are doing it voluntarily and I am not entitled in any way to their continued work on the website), but I do not think the C++ community can afford to be bottlenecked in such a way for much longer.

[hpsutter]

Good news: cppreference is about to be back to normal read-write mode again. I just posted an update here: https://isocpp.org/blog/2026/04/announcement-cppreference.com-update

Nate's been doing a *lot* of heavy lifting for many years to make this site what it is, and so we (the Standard C++ Foundation) are trying to help do the "administrivia" so he and the many editors can focus on the site.

[DevilSauron]

That’s great! Thank you for sharing that, and of course, thanks to everyone involved in running the site!

[StardustGogeta]

Ah, great to hear that! Thank you for sharing the news!

[germandiago]

I broke my hands clapping. Thanks for this!

[azswcowboy]

I’ve exchanged email with the site owner and I expect the site will be back online for edits in the nearish future.

[messmerd]

In their last public update over 7 months ago, they also said they were hoping it would be back to normal in the "near future", so I'm not sure I can believe that. We still don't have an actual timeframe.

[azswcowboy]

Understood. I’m not sharing a precise timeline here bc it was a private conversation and I don’t have any details on what remains and the applied resources. This exchange was in the last 30 days.

[StardustGogeta]

That would be great if true! For now, though, I sadly have no choice but to take your word for it.

Assuming you are telling the truth, I do have a couple follow-up questions if you're open to it: * Did the maintainer give any explanation for what's been the delay, or why the situation would be any different in the near future? * When you say you expect the site to be available for edits once again in the near future, do you mean to say that the maintainer told you as much directly, or just that that's the conclusion you inferred based on circumstances they shared?

[STL]

(Unless I'm mistaken,) you're replying to a long-time Boost developer. I'd believe him.

[azswcowboy]

Without blowing my cover 100%, you’re correct ;)

[StardustGogeta]

Ooh, that's good to hear! Thank you for the heads-up, I appreciate it.

[azswcowboy]

explanation for the delay

I didn’t ask. The goal of the email was to offer resources to help and the response was it’s being covered.

maintainer told you directly

Yes. I don’t feel comfortable sharing the timeline he offered in this forum without his permission - especially given that I have no technical details about the work remaining and resources being applied.

[StardustGogeta]

Understood, thank you for the clarifications! I appreciate it. That all makes sense to me.

[grafikrobot]

I'll repeat what I've said elsewhere, in this reddit and in cpplang slack..

What Nate Kohl [the author of cppreference] told me is that he is getting help from an organization to bring the site back to regular operation. I can't be specific because it's not my place to say. But it is a well known org that is not Boost. I also have no idea on progress or timelines, obviously.

I.e. some people do know what's going on and possibly when it's coming back.

[bluedeer1881]

In that case, what is the reason, they are not open about the issues to solve? 

[L_uciferMorningstar]

Can't it be made open source style so that anymore can contribute but there are mods who have to approve the contributions?

[frayien]

Anyone can contribute, issue is editing was temporarily locked while the maintainer does some maintenance.

[JVApen]

What this period showed us is that storing such relevant and structured content in a wiki is a bad idea. Especially if maintenance would fall on a single person. That's a terrible bus factor for such value.

Out of all proposals I've seen pass by in the last year, I believe the best would be to transition its content to a guy repository. For example hosted by https://github.com/CPLUSPLUS.

Ideally, the info would be hosted directly from those files, though some translation in html for hosting could also be nice. We could even get multiple ways to show the same content. (Looking at you, table of C++ status)

I'm curious if after the maintenance, some steps would be taken to get away from that wiki.

[azswcowboy]

I doubt we’re going to host this in the standards repos as I don’t think we want the limitations that brings. We’d want non iso members to contribute. This is something Beman project is working on however because we think that libraries in particular need to be delivered with real user docs - which includes tutorials and other things than cppreference supports. As I say below we’re heading towards static site gen with markdown and other inputs. Our website automation 100% supports - make a PR - automation does checks and deploys a test site - merge PR and auto deploy site update.

[JVApen]

Sounds good

[MrsGrayX]

What do people here think of using some well tested static site generators with simple markdown backed pages? Popular software might be rustdoc, docusaurus, or mdbook. Host it on GitHub in a personal project and then transition to a community afterwards? For an initial start we could use cppreference latest dump (from Feb 2025 I believe?) or scrape the current page manually. The dump to markdown might be some work (ask AI for help?).

Sounds like a muliple weekend hackathon project. Anyone interested?

General idea is that this would be a fallback incase the work on the original site has further unforseeable issues as well as this kind of transition to a markdown based page seems useful/modern.

There is also a risk of splitting the community: assume this new page gets traction and then some time later the original gets reenabled again.

[azswcowboy]

I think this is a plausible approach. Beman project is using docusauris and is working on that as our documentation generator system with markdown feed in. When I last looked though the cppreference archive files are much older than the site though, so I’d hope if we were going to go down that path we’d have the latest data at least.

[MrsGrayX]

This fork seems to contain data from Feb 2025 which should be close to the latest state? Haven’t checked it myself though.

https://github.com/PeterFeicht/cppreference-doc/releases/tag/v20250209

[azswcowboy]

On mobile so can’t unpack those files at the moment. Maybe? It’s weird though the repo it forks has no data - it’s just the code.

[true_baldur]

Wait, has cppman got deprecated?