International standards have nothing to do with formality in the computer science sense.

US corporations also have massive influence on the C and C++ specifications, just look at the brouhaha around Bloomberg and contracts for C++, for example.

And the Rust Foundation does not author the specification, the Rust Project does. So in many ways, companies on the Foundation board have less direct influence than the companies who send their employees as representative to WG21 or similar.

My use of formal was from: “The standard is not intended to teach how to use C++. Rather, it is an international treaty – a formal, legal, and sometimes mind-numbingly detailed technical document intended primarily for people writing C++ compilers and standard library implementations.”

https://isocpp.org/wiki/faq/wg21 is still very US skewed, but much more diverse than both https://www.rust-lang.org/governance/teams/lang and and the foundation. The latter does influence the direction of the language: https://rustfoundation.org/safety-critical-rust-consortium/

Sure, and that’s the same as the Rust version, regarding formality.

And sure, corporate influence is worth talking about, but the point is C++ isn’t free of it either.