From what I've heard most compiler developers base their work off those final drafts, so you'd be better off using them anyway. Might be an old wives' tale though.
I work at a compilers company and my manager has told us to not work off the drafts and to expense the standard if we lack a copy.
I suspect volunteers working on floss compilers use the draft, but anyone who can expense it has no reason not to.
As an aside, when I need to explain how something works for C, I quote the standard. When I need to explain how something works for C++, I quote Stroustrup's book. The C++ standard is very precise, but also very math-y. Stroustrup is much more approachable.
> I suspect volunteers working on floss compilers use the draft, but anyone who can expense it has no reason not to
This is the best summary of why having to pay for standards is a problem. Let's unpack it carefully.
> volunteers working on floss
An enormous, perhaps the most vital, part of the people working on everyday software stuff.
> anyone who can expense it
Companies and organizations that have money and may or may not have a de facto controlling market share of software that implements a spec
What happens when that company with a controlling market share implements a part of the adopted standard that differs in some apparently insignificant way from from the freely available draft? If that difference turns out to be more significant than it appears, now that company has the only truly spec-compliant implementation, and the rest of the market can't interop because of that difference.
