Just released: the library announced in Anthony Williams Meeting C++ 2025 opening keynote

published at 19.05.2026 13:39 by Jens Weller
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Last week arene-base, the fundamental, safety critical C++ library of Woven by Toyota got released as open source on github with its documentation.

During his opening keynote on Software and Safety at Meeting C++ 2025 Anthony Williams made an announcement: that his team was working on releasing the fundamental library for safety critical low level C++ software that Woven by Toyota had been working on over the last years. It was a nice surprise to see this being announced at the conference last year, and its even nicer to see being released now in 2026! The library is build with C++14, Ubuntu 22.04+ and clang in mind.

Arene-base is AUTOSAR compliant and features backported such as span and mdspan, as well as containers operating on fixed memory to avoid allocations. It uses bazel as a build system and is split into a number of subpackages for easier deployment. In the type traits tutorial you can see how to use arenes type traits to detect if a generic type has an equality operator (==). The library comes also with a partial implementation of the C++14 library, as that is needed on some platforms which are used with Arene.

Its a great opportunity to look at a C++ code base that has been used in an embedded and safety critical context in production. This library could be a useful addition to your embedded toolbelt, offering modern C++ implementations of many newer standards type in a C++14 compatible way.

The current subpackages of arene-base are:

• algorithm: Standard Algorithms
• array
• atomic: Atomic operations in concurrent systems
• bit: Bit Manipulation Facilities
• byte: Byte Handling Facilities
• compare: Three-Way-Comparison and Operator Definitions.
• compiler_support: Facilities For Compiler-Provided Interfaces
• constraints: Facilities For Constraining Templates (SFINAE)
• contracts: Precondition and Invariant Checking
• endian: Endian-Aware Facilities For Manipulating Binary Data
• filesystem: Traversal Oriented Filesystem Access
• functional: Facilities For Functional Programming
• inline_container: Non-Allocating, Static Capacity Containers
• inline_string: Non-Allocating, Static Capacity String
• integer_sequences: Facilities For Manipulating std::integer_sequence
• intrusive: Intrusive Containers
• iterator: Backports of Iterator Facilities From Newer C++ Versions
• math: Facilities For Mathematical Operations
• mdspan: Facilities For Multidimensional Arrays
• memory: Facilities For Memory Region Manipulation
• monostate: Backport of std::monostate
• mutex:  backports and Thread Safety Analysis compatible wrappers.
• optional: A Nullable Value Type
• pointer: Checked Pointer Types
• result: A Return Value That Holds Either a Value, or an Error
• scope_guard: An RAII Helper
• semantic_version: Facilities For Working With Semvers
• source_location: A Backport of std::source_location
• span: A Non-Owning View Onto Contiguous Data
• string_algorithms: Algorithms For Manipulating Strings
• string_view: Non-Owning Views Onto Character Data
• synchronization: Facilities For Synchronization In Concurrent Systems
• testing: Helpers for Writing Robust Unit Tests
• tuple: Facilities For Manipulating std::tuple
• type_info: Additional Information About Types
• type_list: Template Metaprogramming Facilities For Sequences of Types
• type_manipulation: Template Metaprogramming Facilities
• type_traits: Compile-Time Queries For Properties of Types
• unicode: Facilities For Manipulating Unicode Strings
• units: Facilities For Representing Values With Units
• utility: Low level utility facilities
• variant: A Discriminated Union Type

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