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

The C++ code I write these days is actually pretty similar to Rust: everything is explicit, lots of strong types, very simple and clear lifetimes (arenas, pools), non-owning handles instead of pointers. The only difference in practice is that the build systems are different and that the Rust compiler is more helpful (both in catching bugs and reporting errors). Neither a huge deal if you have a proper build and testing setup and when everybody on your team is pretty experienced.

By the way, using "atoi" in a code snippet in 2025 and complaining that it is "not ideal" is, well, not ideal.

I still find it basically impossible to get started with a C++ project.

I tried again recently for a proxy I was writing thinking surely things have evolved at this point. Every single package manager couldn’t handle my very basic and very popular dependencies. I mean I tried every single one. This is completely insane to me.

Not to mention just figuring out how to build it after that which was a massive headache and an ongoing one.

Compared to Rust it’s just night and day.

Outside of embedded programming or some special use cases I have literally no idea why anyone would ever write C++. I’m convinced it’s a bunch of masochists

> Every single package manager couldn’t handle my very basic and very popular dependencies

Well there's your problem - no serious project uses one.

> I’m convinced it’s a bunch of masochists

People use cpp because it's a mature language with mature tooling and an enormous number of mature libraries. Same exact reason anyone uses any language for serious work.

How can you simultaneously call cpp a mature language with mature tooling and acknowledge that there's no working package manager used by any "serious" project?

Package managers per language are a (relatively) new endeavor. The oldest language I can think of that widely adopted it was Perl. Although, perl was quite ahead of it's time in a lot of ways, and php undid some the work of perl and went back to popularizing include type dependencies instead of formal modules with a package manager.

C++ "gets away" with it because of templates. Many (most?) libraries are mostly templates, or at the very least contain templates. So you're forced into include-style dependencies and it's pretty painless. For a good library, it's often downloading a single file and just #include-ing it.

C++ is getting modules now, and maybe that will spur a new interest in package managers. Or maybe not, it might be too late.

It's a relatively new endeavor, but it's also a requirement in 2025 if you want to be portable. The Linux ecosystem was focusing on installing dependencies system-wide for decades (that's how traditional `./configure.sh` expects things to work), and this approach is just inferior in so many ways.

The shenanigans people get into with CMake, Conan, vcpkg, and so on is a patchwork of nightmares and a huge time sink compared to superior solutions that people have gotten used to in other languages, including Rust.

I don't think it's a requirement and it does actually come with it's own set of foot guns. The problem is that these design decisions impact culture, which is why JS has a culture of importing far too many third-party packages. Which comes with it's own set of risks.

I agree overall that the C or C++ way of doing things is more cumbersome, but I don't think that's enough to write off those languages as a whole.