starfreakclone

There's nothing non-standard happening there. The compiler is allowed to translate #include -> import. Here's the standardese expressing that: https://eel.is/c%2B%2Bdraft/cpp.include#10.

I do agree, it's not _exactly_ the same as using _named modules_, but header units share an almost identical piece of machinery in the compiler as named modules. This makes the (future planned) transition to named modules a lot easier since we know the underlying machinery works.

The actual blocker for named modules is not MSVC, it's other compilers catching up--which clang and gcc are doing quite quickly!

Thank you for the pointer! I was actually not aware of this paper at all, which is why it was not included here (not sure how I missed it). I'll be sure to push a revision to the blog which mentions this paper.

Indeed, you could even use a piece tree just like in the blog but you store additional information in each piece which tell the renderer how to layout the associated text. My understanding is that most rich text editors represent the text as a node-based tree anyway.