EA and Bloomberg happened to make similar extensions to the standard library. Then, when the C++0x revision started, they both submitted proposals explaining their extensions including why they felt the extensions were necessary ( http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2007/n227... , http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2015/n446... ). The approach eventually made it into the standard ( https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/memory/memory_resource ).