Comment by chris_wot
3 days ago
"he C++ language committee issues seem to be pointing out that everyone better be abandoning that language as soon as possible if they wish to have any codebase that can be maintained for any length of time."
I'd love to know where he got this impression. The new C++ features go a long way to helping make the language easier, and safer, to use.
Of course the modern C++ are safer but you can still shoot yourself in the foot. Compared to Rust you still need to think about the memory safety when writing C++ while Rust you don't need to think about it at all. The only time you need to think about the memory safety in Rust is when using unsafe keyword, which can be isolated into a dedicated function.
Most C++ developers may don't understand what I mean. You need to proficient in Rust in order to understand it. When I was still using C++ as my primary language I have the same feeling as the other C++ developers about Rust. Once you start to comfortable with Rust you will see it is superior than C++ and you don't want to use C++ anymore.
C++ _has_ been getting safer and safer to write. However:
1. The dangerous footguns haven't gone away 2. There are certain safety problems that simply can't be solved in C++ unless you accept that ABI will be broken and the language won't be backwards compatible.
Circle (https://www.circle-lang.org/site/index.html) and Carbon (https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/) were both started to address this fundamental issue that C++ can't be fully fixed and made safe like Rust without at least some breaking changes.
This article goes into more depth: https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/
In the case of the Linux kernel, a lot of the newer features that C++ has delivered aren't _that_ useful for improving safety because kernel space has special requirements which means a lot of them can't be used. I think Greg is specifically alluding to the "Safety Profiles" feature that the C++ committee looks like it will be going with to address the big safety issues that C++ hasn't yet addressed - that's not going to land any time soon and still won't be as comprehensive as Rust.