alt Hacker NewsI think the problem is that C++ is a poorly designed language with a fundamentally flawed development process.
Instead of letting compiler implementers decide which features to add and how to implement them, C++ employs a standards-first, top-down approach. Features are often defined by committee members who may not use modern C++ in their daily workflows, leaving it entirely up to the individual implementations to catch up.
Some features were standardized back in 2023, yet not a single implementation supports them in 2026.
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> committee members who may not use modern C++ in their daily workflows
Are you sure about this one? I don’t know exactly who’s in the committee these days but last I checked they were all hardcore C++ programmers with decades of experience from the trenches.
I don't think that's true? Nothing gets in the standard without substantial actual experience on at least an experimental compiler branch first. It's just not always your compiler.
> Features are often defined by committee members who may not use modern C++ in their daily workflows, leaving it entirely up to the individual implementations to catch up.
Eh, all of the committee members I've known are obsessed with modern C++, and "can this feature be implemented?" is definitely a blocker; numerous features got kicked down the road from C++0x to later versions because compilers weren't ready for them.
C++ is a language with perfect 30-year backwards compatibility, and which mostly-maintains compatibility with another language it forked from (C), after 40 years of diverging development.
Rust is a language which isn't backwards-compatible, and certainly not compatible with source code in other languages.
Now, sure, Rust has its advantages, but - how can you fault C++ in the context of compatibility?
This is so true and it's a danger for other ecosystems too. Once the big corporations throw their weight in (be it in a committee or only informally) they make their use cases dominant regardless how niche they might be for the rest of the world.
For example in Rust there is one big entity that currently pours a lot of energy into improving C++ interop. Now, this is not exactly a niche topic, but especially in a world where AI makes many rewrites possible that we wouldn't have daunted to think about a couple of years before, we shouldn't waste too much effort to save legacy companies enormous codebases at the detriment of our preferred language.
Rust is impl-first bottom-up and it's stuck with a single implementation and GCC for Rust is still in the works, meanwhile C++26 reflection is already in GCC trunk.