Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

The one thing that sold me on Rust (going from C++) was that there is a single way errors are propagated: the Result type. No need to bother with exceptions, functions returning bool, functions returning 0 on success, functions returning 0 on error, functions returning -1 on error, functions returning negative errno on error, functions taking optional pointer to bool to indicate error (optionally), functions taking reference to std::error_code to set an error (and having an overload with the same name that throws an exception on error if you forget to pass the std::error_code)...I understand there's 30 years of history, but it still is annoying, that even the standard library is not consistent (or striving for consistency).

Then you top it on with `?` shortcut and the functional interface of Result and suddenly error handling becomes fun and easy to deal with, rather than just "return false" with a "TODO: figure out error handling".

The result type does make for some great API design, but SerenityOS shows that this same paradigm also works fine in C++. That includes something similar to the ? operator, though it's closer to a raw function call.

SerenityOS is the first functional OS (as in "boots on actual hardware and has a GUI") I've seen that dares question the 1970s int main() using modern C++ constructs instead, and the API is simply a lot better.

I can imagine someone writing a better standard library for C++ that works a whole lot like Rust's standard library does. Begone with the archaic integer types, make use of the power your language offers!

If we're comparing C++ and Rust, I think the ease of use of enum classes/structs is probably a bigger difference. You can get pretty close, but Rust avoids a lot of boilerplate that makes them quite usable, especially when combined with the match keyword.

I think c++, the language, is ready for the modern world. However, c++, the community, seems to be struck at least 20 years in the past.

C++ carries so much on its back and this makes its evolution over the past decade even more impressive.

Yes, people keep forgeting C++ was made public with CFront 2.0 back in 1989, 36 years of backwards compatibility, to certain extent.

C++ is C compatible so more than 50 years of backward compatibility. Even today the vast majority of C programs can be compiled as C++ and they just work. Often such programs run faster because C++ a few additions that the compiler can use to optimize better, in practice C programs generally mean the stronger rules anyway (but of course when they don't the program is wrong).

<pedantry corner>CFront was never compatible with K&R C to the best of my knowledge, so the actual start date would be whenever C89-style code in widespread use; I'm not sure how long before 1989 that was.