Comment by vintagedave
16 hours ago
A year or so ago I read that there was a design decision railroaded through the committee about what kind of safety approach could be looked at. Its wording effectively prevented Safe C++. I was not at this meeting so I’m going on what others say:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1hppdzc/comment/m4jjo4...
I’m a big fan of Safe C++ and believe its approach — learning from another language, incremental opt-in (just like all good refactorings, work on code and improve it piece by piece) — would have been the path that solved some genuine problems. Profiles seem a hodgepodge. And — to share personal worries about what I read into what comments like the above imply, this is not a statement — I worry deeply about the relationship between who proposes what, and who has pricklier personalities or less connections, with what approach was accepted.
I wish Safe C++ would continue as a hard fork of the language.
As much as the alternatives (profiles) don't solve the issue, Safe C++ (Circle) does have substantial issues as well. You need a separate and largely incompatible standard library, including containers. Generic code (templates) is largely left unsolved on a conceptual level so far. At this point incrementally replacing parts of your code with Rust - which has a mature ecosystem and tooling, remember if you want provable safety none of your dependencies used in Safe C++ code are allowed to be unsafe - is going to be less hassle. Firefox showed you can do it, and even Microsoft is choosing that path for the Windows kernel. Waiting for Safe C++ to be usable, seems like wanting to wait for a worse Rust. Interop is hardly going to be much better than bindings generated by cxx.
I get that, though I think different containers can be refactored well.
Replacing parts with an entirely different language is a whole other level compared to same language, modified standard library.
And I think a big reason Rust is winning is that it works, today. C++ doesn't. There is no other path other than to migrate to another language.