> C++ is often described as complex, hard to learn, and unsafe. That reputation is undeserved. The language itself is not unsafe. On the contrary: it is precise, honest, and consistent. What is unsafe is how it is used if it is misunderstood or if one remains in old patterns.

I think this take needs to stop. It’s a longer way to say “skill issue”. Meanwhile, decades of industry experience have shown that the governing principles of even modern C++ make it incredibly hard (expensive) to deliver high quality software. Not impossible - there’s lots of examples - but unreasonably hard.

C++ is fundamentally unsafe, because that’s how the language works, and if you think otherwise, you don’t know C++. There are patterns and paradigms that people use to limit the risk (and the size of the impact crater), and that’s helpful, but usually very difficult to get right if you also want any of the benefits of using C++ in the first place.

Certain people will disagree, but I surmise that they haven’t actually tried any alternative. Instead they are high on the feeling of having finally grokked C++, which is no small feat, and I know because I’ve been there. But we have to stop making excuses. The range of problems where C++ is unequivocally the superior solution is getting smaller.

> But all of us—the C++ developers—must go back to school. We must learn C++ anew, not because we have forgotten it, but because through evolution it has become a different language. Only those who understand the modern language constructs can use the new tools properly and unfold the potential of this generation of libraries.

Once you get to that point, you might as well create and learn a different language.

The notion that just using the new fancy types automatically makes everything memory safe has to stop. std::expected contains either a value or an error. If you call .value() and you're wrong you get an exception. If you call .error() and you're wrong you get undefined behaviour. This was added in C++23. Since there's no destructuring you have to call these methods btw, just don't make any mistakes with your preconditions! Regardless 90% of memory safety errors I see are temporal. Unless we completely ban references and iterators they will not be going anywhere. Using unique_ptr instead of new does not do anything when you insert into a map while holding a reference to an element.

Developers also have to be able to make their own things. We can't pretend that absolutely everything we will ever need is bundled up in some perfect library. To write a typesafe application you need to be able to create your own domain specific abstractions, which to me precludes them looking like this:

    template <class ty>
    concept db_result_tuple = requires { typename remove_cvref_t<ty>; }
                           && []<class... Es>(std::tuple<Es...>*) {
                                return all_result_args_ok_v<Es...>;
      }( static_cast<typename std::add_pointer_t<remove_cvref_t<ty>>>(nullptr) );

C++ is valuable, because the existing tooling enables you to optimize the runtime peformance of a program (usually you end up with figuring out the best memory layout and utilization).

C++ is valuable becaus it's industry support guarantees code bases live for decades _without the need to modify them_ to latest standards.

C++ is valuable because the industry tooling allows you to verify large areas of the program behaviour at runtime (ASAN etc).

I simply don't understand what type of industrial use this type of theoretical abstraction building serves.

Using the metaprogramming features makes code bases extremly hard to modify and they don't actually protect from a category of runtime errors. I'm speaking from experience.

I would much rather have a codebase with a bit more boilerplate, a bit more unit tests and strong integration testing suite.

The longer I use C++ the more I'm convinced something like Orthodox C++ is the best method to approach the language https://bkaradzic.github.io/posts/orthodoxc++/

This keeps the code maintainable, and performant (with less effor than metaprogramming directed C++).

Note: the above is just an opinion, with a very strong YMMV flavour, coming from two decades in CAD, real time graphics and embedded development.

I also think that named parameters would go a long way toward improving the language.

Lastly, explore some way to make possible a breaking change with "old C++".