IEEE 1076-2019, fondly referred to as VHDL-2019, was approved by IEEE RevCom in September 2019 and published in December 2019. The effort was supported mainly by VHDL users – from requirements definition to LRM writing. This is different from the past where employees of EDA vendors did much of the work – particularly the LRM writing.
Language changes were use model driven and had multiple opportunities to be pruned from implementation. The process started with a discussion of feature requests. Feature requests were then voted on and ranked. High ranked features were discussed and developed into proposals. Proposals were required to provide use models to affirm their worth and validity. Proposals were then developed into language change specifications (LCS).