Modern c++ is a powerful, expressive language. It’s not a “object oriented” language in the fetishistic sense — I don’t write that many classes comparatively. A lot of generic programming and functional algorithms in my case. And I can couple directly to the iron as needed.

Yes there are some unfortunate syntactic issues due to it having evolved from C but that’s how the world works.

There's no avoiding Rust. It's becoming the jQuery of systems programming.

C++ has lost the plot in some respects but you don't, and probably won't ever, end up using all of it. A lot of it is to make it easier to write things like the STL, not your typical end-user program. Learn up to 17, there's some good stuff in there. If someone in an interview gives you some highly complex templatey code snippet to analyse just tell them to go fuck themselves.

I'm translating a subset of statically typed Python to C++:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/05/translation-progress.ht...

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/parser-benchmarks.html

I use very much a "pidgin" subset of the language -- one that is easy to step through in the debugger! The problem with all these fancy new features is that you're more likely to trip over bugs in the debugger, e.g. incorrect line number information and stack traces.

So the generated code doesn't even use operator overloading, which e.g. C++ 11 range for loops require. I want to be able to see everything. Yet I also want to use features like templates, virtual methods, and strict enums, which C doesn't have.

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Another "modern" project that does this is the Souffle datalog compiler, which generates "monolithic" C++ programs with heavy use of C++ templates:

https://souffle-lang.github.io/translate

(I heard about it due to its role in prototyping Rust's type system)

C++ templates are not fun to write but they have some interesting properties for code generation.

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So I would happy if we stopped writing C++ by hand. But I do not like the alternative rewriting inferior versions of existing programs/libraries in entirely new languages. They often have new bugs, are slower, and have fewer features.

I really like what Zig is doing to reuse existing code (i.e. bundling a C compiler). I think that both Rust and Go ecosystems have led to a lot of fragmentation and redundant efforts.

The "History of Clojure" paper has a nice view on that. Why Clojure is tied to the JVM. So it's part of the ecosystem rather than fragmenting it.

Likely not, or at least they shouldn't, as it still has yet to have a 1.0 release and is undergoing constant changes in syntax and API.

However, that doesn't mean one can't take the time to learn it right now. Zig shows a lot of promise for being a real contender in this space once it does have a stable release.

Zig is cool but still very much unstable, running it in production is very much not recommended and/or insane. There's still quite a lot of compiler/stdlib bugs, design edge cases, and breaking changes including introduction of new bugs.

But it's amazingly refreshing for hobby stuff!

I'm not sure if that's meant as a good thing or a bad thing. Given the target audience, I expect a good thing, as for people not entirely immersed into JavaScript and web development at the time (which I expect most people reading about C++ features here were not), jQuery was a godsend. It gets kind of a bad wrap these days, but from my perspective, JavaScript just adopted all the paradigms it encouraged into the language so it's no longer needed. Hard to argue with that success, IMO.

A more concrete example of this is Windows and Java's use of UCS-2 as their character type. That was a forward thinking move which then became a painful legacy issue when Unicode changed.

That's inevitably going to happen to Rust to some extent, but it's targetting a realm that is far slower to evolve and it seems like they are very mindful of history and theory.

As I'm mostly retired at this point, I don't really care how marketable skills are anymore. I go for what looks interesting.

Yes, absolutely. I (somewhat recently) did that, and I find modern C++ to be almost like a new language. The "modern" features are very useful and powerful.

I don’t mean this as an insult: Pike is quite open about choosing a different region of the design space; he had good reasons for it, they just happen not to work for me.

Studying everything new is, of course, a much more ambitious goal.

It’s pretty hard to express that an object must be invariant without a thing like that. You can’t do so with the storage itself as the object may be passed to a function.

Although there are legit cases for what you describe, it’s a pretty uncommon case.

This correctly prevents one from calling Drop::drop twice without extra hacks, and demonstrates that the location is completely deinitialized and can be reinitialized to anything.

It is also dual to how, seemingly magically,

    let x;
    x = foo();

Wouldn't calling a destructor on an object twice will also compile in C++? I don't really see this as an issue in either language; the solution is "don't ever call `drop`/destructors manually"

    fn main() {
        let mut v = vec![1, 2, 3];
        
        v.drop();
    }

       Compiling playground v0.0.1 (/playground)
    error[E0040]: explicit use of destructor method
     --> src/main.rs:4:7
      |
    4 |     v.drop();
      |       ^^^^
      |       |
      |       explicit destructor calls not allowed
      |       help: consider using `drop` function: `drop(v)`
    
    error: aborting due to previous error

Your parent's point is that this is kind of a weird corner case that only applies to drop.