Martin Odersky has, in my opinion, been doing so many things right with Scala, and it revealed to me the mistakes I have with regards to Heron. One thing that Scala has, as do other successful languages, is the ability to seamlessly integrate with an existing popular language (in Scala's case, it is Java). In that vein I have decided to make Heron completely compatible with C++, and I have decided to release the next version of Heron with a very large standard library culled from Boost, STLSoft, wxWidgets, and my own OOTL.

I think that by making sure that Heron has a powerful standard library, it could contribute significantly to its success in the future.

The main selling point of the new Heron is going to be structural subtyping (see the BIL for more information on what I mean by this), and Programming with Contract support. After this there will just be a long list of niceties, which amount primarily to syntactic sugar. However, I think syntactic sugar can still be important, after all most of C++ is in fact synactic sugar for C.

The next Heron release may be slightly less arousing to the language hobbyists, but hopefully I will be able to provide programmers with a truly useful tool which enables them to more quickly develop efficient and correct software.