you DO need to be a wizard to launch a large C++ project.
Yes, languages that are beginner friendly are ... friendlier. Yes, languages that stick to one or a small number of programming paradigms are friendlier. But if you want the "flexible efficiency and raw power of C" and "something higher level than C", C++ is your baby.
Maybe it would be better if we all used Java, Rust, and Go, but C++ sings its siren von Neumann song to the wizards, and there will always be wizard musicologists who steer their projects toward those rocks and, when they have just enough wax in their ears, they sail right past the rocks and come out the other side of the straits leading the rest of the fleet.
You can choose to follow them or not, for there's no shame in coming in 4th.
Even the wizards are moving to Rust/Zig since C++ stdlib performance is becoming terrible thanks to the ABI-frozen till heat-death of the universe decision. Even wizards don't want to build a stdlib of their own from scratch.
Feel the committee was smoking weed that day in la-la land. You can ignore all the safety stuff from Sean Baxter, but saying no to performance on the altar of permanent, un-specified ABI backward compatibility - when such was never mentioned as a design goal of C++ - means its "Goodbye C++" for a long, long list of orgs and "wizards". The ABI was NEVER specified formally by the C++ standard - so why bother sacrificing the world for its immortal existence ?
C++ is NO longer the choice of language for greenfield native projects and the committee takes the full blame.
Really looking forward to zig 1.0. I feel like C++ has become a language where professionals are fine with the historical grime but for hobbyist and people that need C++ occasionally there is just no motivation in the community to make this language more ergonomic.
ABI compatibility is one of those things that is necessary with such a long history, especially with commercial libraries that don't really have an equivalent in the newer languages. The issue with C++ that doesn't exist with it's competitors is that there is a long tail of software people use commercially that isn't source available that's incredibly important in certain use cases.
I worked in a previous role on C++ CAD/simulation software that required vendored things like solid modelling kernels and it was incredibly painful. Occasionally one of the vendors would just not do the work and you'd end up having to spend half a year ripping out the dependency that worked perfectly well. The team working on the software were generally in favour of moving up through to modern standards, while I was there we did 03 -> 17 for e.g. but that didn't finish til 4 years after the C++17 standard came out for all sorts of reasons. When VS2017 came out everyone breathed a sigh of relief because suddenly we didn't have to wait to upgrade the compiler.
So here's the thing. Almost none of the problems I have with C++ are related to "flexible efficiency and raw power of C". You could easily have language that is even more flexible and powerful, but much easier to use. Or not even use, just install.
C++ was always by far the most inefficient langauge to work with for me, because there's just so much chore and nonsense that you have to get through to get anything done, and almost none of it has any reasonable purpose, there's no efficency tradeoff. I'm pretty sure that the insane build situation or UB in uninitialized variables or unspecified argument evaluation order never really benefited anybody, they are just bad decisions in the language, and that's all.
> UB in uninitialized variables
You will be happy to learn the uninitialized variables are not UB as of C++26.
They're just initialized to some unspecified value and cause almost-as-hard-to-diagnose faults.
the unspecified value is supposed to be something really obviously wrong (in particular sanitizers will look for it.) and so be easier to diagnose with tools. Unlike 0 which is really hard to diagnose because often it is the right value and so when it isn't you won't realize what you did wrong.
> but C++ sings its siren von Neumann song to the wizards, and there will always be wizard musicologists who steer their projects toward those rocks and, when they have just enough wax in their ears, they sail right past the rocks and come out the other side of the straits leading the rest of the fleet.
beautiful, in equal parts true, sad, and endearing.
but also remember the vasa.
So much for the theory, then there is the hard reality how standard library is implemented, the variantions across implementations, and how the ongoing ABI drama is preventing any performance improvements to it.