There's the chance that its newness means it's not thoroughly tested yet. In any language with a reasonable development process, I'd open a bug report and then figure out a workaround until it's fixed. But I'd expect the interval between "feature is released" and "feature works as documented, modulo the usual long tail of edge cases" to be on the order of weeks or months, not decades.
Like, I can't imagine only now upgrading to Python 2.7 (which was current in 2011). I wouldn't expect every shop to be on 3.13 already, but neither would I scowl at a dev who wanted to use something new from a 2-year-old version.
Python is a great example of a software community that has enormous trouble due to always changing the languae and using new features. It's pretty much infeasible to run a python program on your system python these days. Every single python program requires it's entire own custom python in a container.
Every platform provides a very easy way to install the latest version of clang.
> It's pretty much infeasible to run a python program on your system python these days.
System python shouldn't be a thing in the first place. If you want to run some python program in 2025 you just
uv venv --python 3.whateverSour gapes. The idea that "system python shouldn't be a thing" is really radical and massive change from the status quo of languages. Especially interpreted languages.
There are plenty of languages that work just fine on system interpreter/compiler with no need of an entire language for each program. Perl is one example that is very comparable to python. The important difference is that Perl hasn't been split into hundreds of different languages like python due to popularity.
> Every platform provides a very easy way to install the latest version of clang.
Once again sour grapes. Abandoning the idea of your system compiler working for C++ is wild.
why? most operating systems (Windows, macOS, Android, iOS etc) don't even have a system compiler, it's a separate app that you install (and for which you can thankfully install multiple versions in parallel, unlike the stupid linux idea that every app should only ever have one version installed at any given time).
In Python terms, today I wouldn't break a sweat to manage unsupported Python versions (https://devguide.python.org/versions/). If my stuff runs on an old Python 3.8 system, right on! I wouldn't deliberately break it or anything. But if something came along in 3.9 that makes my life more pleasant, I wouldn't hesitate to use it.
I also vehemently disagree with your Python characterization. There are any number of common, well-supported ways to easily install arbitrary versions on your system, including pyenv and uv. I have multiple versions installed on the laptop I'm typing this on. I do zero development inside containers: all my work runs directly on the host. And yet, none of them conflict with each other at all.
this doesn't match what I see. The Jetbrains 2023 survey reported that 80% of C++ in use was >= C++17. Qt, one of the most common C++ UI framework, has been requiring C++17 for five years and support C++20 types in its API.
Also I note that 25%+ of the Jetbrains 2023 survey use C++11 or older. And 50% of Jetbrains survey devs say "No, I don't plan to move to another C++ standard" from C++11. So it's likely that 25% will stay high.
Additionally between C++11 and C++14, it is a mistake to use C++11 instead of C++14, as the later is basically the set of features that missed C++11, especially relevant in smart pointers machinery.