I am very worried by feature creep in libc++ and libstdc++ and the harm that this inflicts on the wider C++ ecosystem. Transitive inclusion of large parts of the STL, and entangling of STL with core language features are both extremely bad. This should IMO be topic #1 of the committee but is barely even noticed. The mantra "It's okay, modules will save us" is naive and will not work.
I was somewhat horrified to discover that the STL ended up with a special role in the language spec. (IIRC, one of the tie-ins is initializer lists.)
IMHO it's far wiser to leave the standard library as something that isn't needed by the core language, and where users can (at least in principle) provide their own alternative implementation without needing compiler hacks.
I.e., those details are inherent in the definition of "library" in the C/C++ world.
Which languages have a standard library that contains nothing requiring intimate integration with the language implementation itself? I'm not aware of any, even limited-standard-library C included.
> I was somewhat horrified to discover that the STL ended up with a special role in the language spec. (IIRC, one of the tie-ins is initializer lists.)
The language specification is already larger than several classical tomes of fiction. A reader could choose to tuck in with the C++ spec, or with War and Peace.
And given how much of the language's spec is "The behavior is undefined when combining these two features," it's not really a tome that is safely ignored.
At this point, I cannot recommend C++ on any new project that some external factor such as safety certification (which "solves" the problem by adding yet more pages of stuff a developer must not do that the language syntactically supports and compiles but generates garbage output) isn't forcing my hand on.
As of 2026 C has eclipsed C++ in popularity on the TIOBE index; anecdotally, roboticists I've chatted with have told me they prefer to write core functionality as C modules and then weld them together into high-level behavior with a terser scripting DSL over trying to write the whole thing in C++ and hoping there's no undefined behavior hidden in the cracks that multiple layers of linters, sanitizers, and auto-certifiers have missed.
