The standardization process here feels similar to what happened with JavaScript modules. Introduced in ES2015, but the language standard only had syntax and some invariants. It had no notion of how to load modules, or how they might be delivered, or how a program that had a module at its root might be started. But there was a similar urgency, of "we must have this in ES2015".
I made it one of my first projects after joining the Chrome team to fix that gap, which we documented at [1]. (This reminds me of the article's "The only real way to get those done is to have a product owner...".)
You could even stretch the analogy to talk about how standard JS modules compete against the hacked-together solutions of AMD or CommonJS modules, similar to C++ modules competing against precompiled headers.
That said, the C++ modules problem seems worse than the JavaScript one. The technical design seems harder; JS's host/language separation seems cleaner than C++'s spec/compiler split. Perhaps most importantly, organizationally there was a clear place (the WHATWG) where all the browsers were willing to get together to work on a standard for JS module loading. Whereas it doesn't seem like there's as much of a framework for collaboration between C++ compiler writers.
I made it one of my first projects after joining the Chrome team to fix that gap, which we documented at [1]. (This reminds me of the article's "The only real way to get those done is to have a product owner...".)
You could even stretch the analogy to talk about how standard JS modules compete against the hacked-together solutions of AMD or CommonJS modules, similar to C++ modules competing against precompiled headers.
That said, the C++ modules problem seems worse than the JavaScript one. The technical design seems harder; JS's host/language separation seems cleaner than C++'s spec/compiler split. Perhaps most importantly, organizationally there was a clear place (the WHATWG) where all the browsers were willing to get together to work on a standard for JS module loading. Whereas it doesn't seem like there's as much of a framework for collaboration between C++ compiler writers.
[1]: https://blog.whatwg.org/js-modules