Comment by Voultapher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Voultapher | Hacker News Reader

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At this point I'm wondering if C++ leadership is either willfully ignorant or genuinely in denial.

I know several people on various C++ committees and by and large their opinion is, we evolve the language and library to give existing projects incremental improvements without asking them to rewrite them, but if you are starting with a new project C++ is often a subpar option. From that perspective I get why they'd be hesitant about efforts like Circle. Circle and co. ask developers to rewrite their code, in something that looks very different to normal C++ - whatever normal C++ even is, given the multitude of dialects out there - can't seamlessly interop with existing code, needs a new incompatible standard library, that as of now doesn't even exist. At which point, honestly just rewrite it in Rust instead of going through the painful exercise to use something that's 10+ years behind where Rust is today in terms of DX, tooling and ecosystem.

But all that doesn't explain why at the very top, even mentioning Rust as an alternative seems taboo, idk.

There is also a strange dynamic going, and this has worked against C++.

In the early ISO days, the people sent to ISO were employees from compiler vendors, and existing practice was the key factor into adding stuff to the standard.

Eventually, comitee dynamics took place, and nowadays most of the contributors to WG21, and to lesser extent WG14 (which still keeps more close to the existing practice spirit), you have hundreds of contributors wanting to leave their historical mark on the ISO standard, withough having written a single line of compiler code, validating their proposal, which they are able to fight trough the whole voting process, and then leave the compiler vendors sorting out the mess how to implement their beloved feature.

Those of us that really like C++, are also kind of lost on how things turned out this way.

Well, you kind of have your answer right there: it’s a language designed by committee, not by “the industry”.

This has been my biggest problem, and I say this as someone who has been on and off developing C++ for over 2 decades.

At the same time, it’s a safe bet to say that C++ will still be around in another 2 decades.

Don't forget that same applies to C.

And COBOL.

Yeah, however at least COBOL wasn't designed without bounds checking, or pointer based strings, in 1959 hardware.

In 1959 people still made mistakes. By the time C came around, human error was all but eliminated. /s

Proof of implementation should be a requirement for every proposal (allegedly it is, but in practice...).

Which would limit most "outsider" proposals mostly to library features, which would be a good thing I guess.

WG21 is well down the path of actively being hostile to the implementers of C++. There was a recent proposal where all 4 implementers [1] stood up and said "no", and the committee still voted it in, ignoring their feedback.

[1] C++ has only 4 implementations these days, Clang, EDG, GCC, and MSVC; everything keeping up with the standard is a fork of one of these projects.

This is why I see C++26 as the last great standard, it would likely be C++23 if it wasn't for reflection.

Not that WG21 won't produce further ones, just like has happened with other ecosystems of similar age, who cares about Fortran 2023, or COBOL 2023 revisions, despite their critical use in many research projects, or companies infrastructure.

It is already good enough (minus the security issues), for the existing infrastructure that relies on C++, and most of the new stuff isn't helping.

Which proposal?

> even mentioning Rust as an alternative seems taboo, idk.

Rust is even framed as an "attack on C++" by Stroustrup himself [1]. No wonder it's taboo.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/02/c_creator_calls_for_a...

Seems like a bit of a sensationalist deduction from what looks like a pretty levelheaded response. It's not a call to war, but call to improve the C++ standard

The Register article was written based on a leaked paper, since then, Bjarne published the article itself, which you can read here: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2025/p36...

Not trying to take a position about if it's sensational or not, just wanting to add a primary source here.

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