I was deeply saddened by the vote the article refers to that effectively excluded Sean Baxter's Safe C++. It felt like a push that prevented tabling the solution at all. If Safe C++ had been debated on its merits, that would be one thing, but this seemed (to me) to prevent ever getting to that point. Who knows if that was the intent: the result is what disappointed me.
In my view, one of the major compiler vendors needs to take on Safe C++ and start supporting it... with refactoring tooling to get a codebase there. Because as this article says, tooling is key.
>“We must minimize the need to change existing code. For adoption in existing code, decades of experience has consistently shown that most customers with large code bases cannot and will not change even 1% of their lines of code in order to satisfy strictness rules, not even for safety reasons unless regulatory requirements compel them to do so.”
But the major players do seem to be happy to replace their C++ code with Rust.
Perhaps it's time to ease up on the backwards compatibility. Especially in the era of AI.
> But the major players do seem to be happy to replace their C++ code with Rust.
Because incremental improvements don't provide enough value. A stable C++ codebase is best left untouched. It's not worth to rewrite C++ into C++++ to get a couple of features that are flawed retrofits backported from modern languages. In the end you still have C++.
Haskell has a pretty good story about how to use different dialects in the front end of the language, as long as the backend is still the same. Well, when I say Haskell, I mean ghc.
Alas, C++ still mostly does its libraries via conceptual copy-and-paste (#include). So that would need to be fixed, if you wanted to mix-and-match dialects. You could probably keep '#include' syntax, but subtly change its meaning.
Should have a (2024) annotation so far as I can see (haven't finished reading the article but it seems to be about events which have "just happened" back then)
It's a committee, many people are involved, all with different opinions, but any decision requires consensus.
Why would anyone expect big broad changes? And historically, whenever they did happen anyway through forced compromise, they resulted in failure because they were not consistently implemented.
The only way that works is small compatible and iterative changes.
A big problem is that "consensus" for WG21 is actually just "Did the chair of your sub-sub-committee say there was consensus?" and is typically measured by voting. That's not a consensus, it's a majority.
If you've worked on technical problems with an IETF Working Group you'll know what actual consensus looks like. If you've been around a while you might even have seen abuse of process used to dodge rules and seen demonstrated before you why we need consensus anyway. ISO's procedures are probably adequate for its original goals but they're completely inappropriate for designing a programming language. SC22 should never have existed and is entirely the wrong place to do this work.
Very interesting summary of facts and quotations with conclusions. I would say there are even more camps than the two mentioned. Personally I think C++98 and Qt5 just worked and were good enough for all purposes, and C++ since has become an ever moving target with a lot of incompatibilities between compilers. Chasing for the ever latest version of the language and compilers is very expensive and enervating. I prefer how they solved this e.g. in the Ada community; they take their time for the release a new standard version, and until then, most compiler vendors have already updated their products and there was relevant experience with the new features long before the new standard was passed. In computer science, it seems to be a law of nature to keep "improving" good things until they become unusable and people walk away. In C++ I did so; I have a few C++11 code bases (some back ported from newer versions), but most are C++98/03; I even made a fork of Qt5 (LeanQt) with my own build system (BUSY) which is less work to maintain than continuously chasing new compiler/tool incompatibilities among platforms.
I understand the issue about the ever-moving target etc., but almost fifteen years later do you really believe C++98 is better than C++11 without move semantics and decent smart pointers? I remember working with Qt5 and C++98 and yes, it was productive, but it was also a mess of intricate object ownership.
I'm critical about some choices made with C++20 and after, like the mess that modules are, and the too-little-too-late ranges library. C++26 is also a joke imho. But on the other hand, working with std::optional and (in C++23) std::expected is so much better than without. The thing is nobody forces you to use every single feature of a new standard, but I would not recommend ignoring very good tools just for the sake of it.
For all of my projects it is good enough. C++11 onwards has a few advantages, but I don't need them. Moving ownership between containers to avoid allocations was possible with the standard library even before C++11, and Qt offered "implicit sharing" which has a similar effect without syntax changes and incompatibilities. Even with my C++11 projects (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/eigen/) I had to take care still in 2024 which feature not to use on MSVC because it didn't work or behaved differently. I never have any ownership issues and I implement large compiler projects with different AST and IR layers. All my projects still compile with https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ on all platforms. I would never trade a tiny language advantage with a whole world of dependability issues. One day I will revive and refactor GCC 4.7 to get a cross-platform C++98 with parts of 11 compiler just written in C, then latest all of my software is buildable "from first principles".
PS: it's funny I wrote my comment three days (and not an hour) ago.
> Moving ownership between containers to avoid allocations was possible
That's not the biggest upside of move semantics. You can't safely express smart pointers without move semantics. They tried with std::auto_ptr, and it didn't work.
Much has changed for me since I used smart pointers where possible - which is the vast majority of the time. I am currently telling somebody you can't change a QString to a C string even though the C string probably won't overflow in that use. I have changed.
C++26 will allow billions of lines of pointless serialization boilerplate to finally be deleted, adding the basic reflection functionality that most other languages have had for decades.
Reflection is a joke. De/serializing arbitrary C++ structs is ill-defined. When you need serialization, even lots of it (e.g. silly JSON), I think you're better off writing your own framework where you can be clear about data formats and transformation rules.
Yes, C++26 reflection is nice, but also extremely complex to understand and use well. The rest of C++26 is the usual series of too-little-too-late additions. Meanwhile I’m still waiting for pattern matching to become a thing (a proposal has been discussed for ages)
You can incrementally refactor existing code to make it more maintainable and easier to implement the things you are working on.
The issue with Netscape (per that article) was that it was a rewrite, not a refactor. I.e. replacing all the existing code with new code. That's why it took a long time to release a new version: the previous code hadn't changed and the new code wasn't functionally equivalent to the existing code, let alone have any new features.
> Google supposedly significantly lowered its participation in the C++ development process, and instead started to work on their own C++ successor language.
Did they decide to keep things as is or rewrite in Rust with LLM assistance in the couple years since this article? Carbon seems to have gone nowhere.
Successor languages usually take a long time. Some of them are made by people who are bad at estimates and will grandly tell you that next year they will have finished the language, but that's just because they actually have no idea. In reality it's typically ballpark ten years.
Most programming languages "go nowhere" in the sense that they never end up used for lots of real world projects - but they can have interesting and useful ideas which inspire future languages.
Google writes a tremendous amount of new code. You can reap a large portion of the benefits by using Rust for new code.
Go is good enough for many tasks. Google wrote that as a replacement for C++ too. I guess Carbon is intended to be more for systems programming? Go had that intent initially, but soon realized that's not a good fit.
At least as far as public info goes it's still being worked on. The GitHub repo [0] has pretty consistent activity and some recent-ish talks [1], one of which says that they are considering a 0.1 release "early next year".
I think that the steering committee currently considers that backwards compatibility has higher priority compared to strict memory safety. When the priorities will inverse then solutions will be found.
What seems to be happening today is that outside specific domains like HFT, games, embedded systems or stuff like CUDA where C/C++ is the king, nobody wants to write new code in C/C++ or at least starting new projects in the language, while fervently migrating safety critical code to Rust.
Even in those domains there are efforts to do things in Rust, although it's unclear when Rust is going to be an actually serious/viable option.
I suspect C++ will become less of a "mainstream" language but only relevant in those specific domains. OS / Services will consider alternatives first.
In 2026, there really needs to be a REALLY good reason for people to use C++ for greenfield projects over using something like Rust, Go or C#. I mean, I've made it work, but that pretty much involves making a completely new build system AND test framework from scratch because C++ tooling is just that bad, because I swear I spent 2 days trying to setup CMake to get Skyrim modding setup, and in the end, I had to tap out and begrudgingly had Codex do it.
The other major problem for C++ is that correct C++ basically looks like nonsense, because the committee insists on pushing dangerous footguns that nobody sane would ever use in normal codebases through yet takes their sweet time with adding basic functionalities like pattern matching or even "print", which is somehow finally added in C++23. Worse still, nothing is ever really allowed to be removed/deprecated from C++, so you have decades of accumulated syntax debt that nobody is allowed to actually fix.
I think the biggest issue with C++ is that despite the fact that 90% of the language just should not be used in any normal code, period, there really is nothing that can replace C++ in its niche of high performance, low-level systems level programming. There is a good language buried underneath C++ somewhere, it's just that nobody has taken the time to extract it.
Lack of support for type-safe containers (need to be hack toghether via macros) and overreliance on macros in general (which are not IDE and debugger friendly) are two aspects of C that are off-putting for majority of people in 2026. That's even assuming you're willing to forego pointer/memory safety.
Well, Carbon would have been better off if they just made "C with `match` and sane error handling" instead of whatever it is they are building there over at Google. But still, I think C and C++ are honestly very different languages at this point and that you can't really call C++ a superset of C at all really.
> involves making a completely new build system AND test framework from scratch because C++ tooling is just that bad
In 2026, CMake is the standard build tool, and Google Test is usually a safe choice. There are many example projects on GitHub to learn how to use them.
Carbon isn't even a real language, no real language will spent 4 entire years and is still stuck in version 0.0.0-0. It feels more like bad Rust than a proper C++ successor at all.
Just to give you a small example? why would a C++ successor language use `fn main()` instead of using C/C++ style `int main()`? And their generics system is even more confusing, are they going to support a new form of generics or are they sticking with templates? And if they are going to add templates, why would they not add pretty much one of the best additions to modern C++ to Carbon, concepts?
> why would a C++ successor language use `fn main()` instead of using C/C++ style `int main()`
Apparently easier and faster parsing. Most modern language have arrived at the `fn bla(arg: ArgType): ResultType` form and I don't think they made that decision for purely aesthetical reasons.
No, it's C :) And for me that's not even a hot take anymore, I switched back to C (specifically C99 and later) around 2017 after nearly 20 years of C++ as my main language, and I don't miss C++ the slightest. The hardest part was unlearning some bad C++ habits. The other 'behaviour change' for me was to open my mind to more programming languages. E.g. instead of trying to solve every problem with C++ I now pick a language that better matches the problem I want to solve (e.g. on one end of my language toolbox is C, on the other extreme end is Typescript, and somewhere in the middle are Zig, on Mac of course the occasional ObjC (not a fan of Swift tbh), and yes, sometimes even still modern C++ - in the end, the choice of language is mostly driven by the dependencies you need to use).
> In 2026, there really needs to be a REALLY good reason for people to use C++ for greenfield projects over using something like Rust, Go or C#.
I don't think that professional developers go around mindlessly starting projects without evaluating their choices. The truth of the matter is that the whole industry has been picking C++ over alternatives for ages, to the point where C++ managed to get one of the most popular languages devised. Why do you think that happened?
> I mean, I've made it work, but that pretty much involves making a completely new build system AND test framework from scratch (...)
That says more about your competence than anything. I mean, CMake works so well that companies such as Jetbrains developed their C++ IDEs around it. But somehow you seem to struggle where everyone just dash towards coding. Why is that?
I was deeply saddened by the vote the article refers to that effectively excluded Sean Baxter's Safe C++. It felt like a push that prevented tabling the solution at all. If Safe C++ had been debated on its merits, that would be one thing, but this seemed (to me) to prevent ever getting to that point. Who knows if that was the intent: the result is what disappointed me.
In my view, one of the major compiler vendors needs to take on Safe C++ and start supporting it... with refactoring tooling to get a codebase there. Because as this article says, tooling is key.
>“We must minimize the need to change existing code. For adoption in existing code, decades of experience has consistently shown that most customers with large code bases cannot and will not change even 1% of their lines of code in order to satisfy strictness rules, not even for safety reasons unless regulatory requirements compel them to do so.”
But the major players do seem to be happy to replace their C++ code with Rust.
Perhaps it's time to ease up on the backwards compatibility. Especially in the era of AI.
> But the major players do seem to be happy to replace their C++ code with Rust.
Because incremental improvements don't provide enough value. A stable C++ codebase is best left untouched. It's not worth to rewrite C++ into C++++ to get a couple of features that are flawed retrofits backported from modern languages. In the end you still have C++.
Haskell has a pretty good story about how to use different dialects in the front end of the language, as long as the backend is still the same. Well, when I say Haskell, I mean ghc.
Alas, C++ still mostly does its libraries via conceptual copy-and-paste (#include). So that would need to be fixed, if you wanted to mix-and-match dialects. You could probably keep '#include' syntax, but subtly change its meaning.
Should have a (2024) annotation so far as I can see (haven't finished reading the article but it seems to be about events which have "just happened" back then)
also at the time this is what HN wrote about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42231489
It's a committee, many people are involved, all with different opinions, but any decision requires consensus.
Why would anyone expect big broad changes? And historically, whenever they did happen anyway through forced compromise, they resulted in failure because they were not consistently implemented.
The only way that works is small compatible and iterative changes.
A big problem is that "consensus" for WG21 is actually just "Did the chair of your sub-sub-committee say there was consensus?" and is typically measured by voting. That's not a consensus, it's a majority.
If you've worked on technical problems with an IETF Working Group you'll know what actual consensus looks like. If you've been around a while you might even have seen abuse of process used to dodge rules and seen demonstrated before you why we need consensus anyway. ISO's procedures are probably adequate for its original goals but they're completely inappropriate for designing a programming language. SC22 should never have existed and is entirely the wrong place to do this work.
Try building google opensource projects. They'll be mostly broken on your own toolchain.
Previous HN discussion here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42231489); 2024-11-24, 554 points, 653 comments
Very interesting summary of facts and quotations with conclusions. I would say there are even more camps than the two mentioned. Personally I think C++98 and Qt5 just worked and were good enough for all purposes, and C++ since has become an ever moving target with a lot of incompatibilities between compilers. Chasing for the ever latest version of the language and compilers is very expensive and enervating. I prefer how they solved this e.g. in the Ada community; they take their time for the release a new standard version, and until then, most compiler vendors have already updated their products and there was relevant experience with the new features long before the new standard was passed. In computer science, it seems to be a law of nature to keep "improving" good things until they become unusable and people walk away. In C++ I did so; I have a few C++11 code bases (some back ported from newer versions), but most are C++98/03; I even made a fork of Qt5 (LeanQt) with my own build system (BUSY) which is less work to maintain than continuously chasing new compiler/tool incompatibilities among platforms.
I understand the issue about the ever-moving target etc., but almost fifteen years later do you really believe C++98 is better than C++11 without move semantics and decent smart pointers? I remember working with Qt5 and C++98 and yes, it was productive, but it was also a mess of intricate object ownership.
I'm critical about some choices made with C++20 and after, like the mess that modules are, and the too-little-too-late ranges library. C++26 is also a joke imho. But on the other hand, working with std::optional and (in C++23) std::expected is so much better than without. The thing is nobody forces you to use every single feature of a new standard, but I would not recommend ignoring very good tools just for the sake of it.
For all of my projects it is good enough. C++11 onwards has a few advantages, but I don't need them. Moving ownership between containers to avoid allocations was possible with the standard library even before C++11, and Qt offered "implicit sharing" which has a similar effect without syntax changes and incompatibilities. Even with my C++11 projects (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/eigen/) I had to take care still in 2024 which feature not to use on MSVC because it didn't work or behaved differently. I never have any ownership issues and I implement large compiler projects with different AST and IR layers. All my projects still compile with https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ on all platforms. I would never trade a tiny language advantage with a whole world of dependability issues. One day I will revive and refactor GCC 4.7 to get a cross-platform C++98 with parts of 11 compiler just written in C, then latest all of my software is buildable "from first principles".
PS: it's funny I wrote my comment three days (and not an hour) ago.
> Moving ownership between containers to avoid allocations was possible
That's not the biggest upside of move semantics. You can't safely express smart pointers without move semantics. They tried with std::auto_ptr, and it didn't work.
Have a look at Qt implicit sharing. There is/was also a Boost library which could do most of it long before c++11.
> it was also a mess of intricate object ownership
Not much has changed, though, it still is. Just with a lot more bells and whistles around it
Much has changed for me since I used smart pointers where possible - which is the vast majority of the time. I am currently telling somebody you can't change a QString to a C string even though the C string probably won't overflow in that use. I have changed.
Smart pointers existed long before C++11. std::auto_ptr was a mistake, but it wasn't the only option
>C++26 is also a joke imho.
C++26 will allow billions of lines of pointless serialization boilerplate to finally be deleted, adding the basic reflection functionality that most other languages have had for decades.
Reflection is a joke. De/serializing arbitrary C++ structs is ill-defined. When you need serialization, even lots of it (e.g. silly JSON), I think you're better off writing your own framework where you can be clear about data formats and transformation rules.
Reflection is likely useful for a lot of things, but I agree serialization need a better framework.
Yes, C++26 reflection is nice, but also extremely complex to understand and use well. The rest of C++26 is the usual series of too-little-too-late additions. Meanwhile I’m still waiting for pattern matching to become a thing (a proposal has been discussed for ages)
I can't think of a time where using reflection for serialisation hasn't come back to bite me.
> it’s at least a bitter awareness of the fact that the industry doesn’t care to refactor existing code
Refactoring working, terrain-tested code?!?
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
You can incrementally refactor existing code to make it more maintainable and easier to implement the things you are working on.
The issue with Netscape (per that article) was that it was a rewrite, not a refactor. I.e. replacing all the existing code with new code. That's why it took a long time to release a new version: the previous code hadn't changed and the new code wasn't functionally equivalent to the existing code, let alone have any new features.
wait. that's about the green field rewrite of Netscape. not about refactoring where needed.
actually it is very explicitly pushing to refactor and rejuvenate the working field tested code, instead of green field rewriting it.
elsewhere he goes on to what's needed for that, also see the great both entertaining and informative fosdem talks about rejuvenating LibreOffice
> Google supposedly significantly lowered its participation in the C++ development process, and instead started to work on their own C++ successor language.
Did they decide to keep things as is or rewrite in Rust with LLM assistance in the couple years since this article? Carbon seems to have gone nowhere.
Successor languages usually take a long time. Some of them are made by people who are bad at estimates and will grandly tell you that next year they will have finished the language, but that's just because they actually have no idea. In reality it's typically ballpark ten years.
Most programming languages "go nowhere" in the sense that they never end up used for lots of real world projects - but they can have interesting and useful ideas which inspire future languages.
Google writes a tremendous amount of new code. You can reap a large portion of the benefits by using Rust for new code.
Go is good enough for many tasks. Google wrote that as a replacement for C++ too. I guess Carbon is intended to be more for systems programming? Go had that intent initially, but soon realized that's not a good fit.
> Carbon seems to have gone nowhere.
At least as far as public info goes it's still being worked on. The GitHub repo [0] has pretty consistent activity and some recent-ish talks [1], one of which says that they are considering a 0.1 release "early next year".
[0]: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang
[1]: https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang#2026
https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/pulls?q=is%3A...
an active project indeed!
(2024)
Past discussion (653 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42231489
I think that the steering committee currently considers that backwards compatibility has higher priority compared to strict memory safety. When the priorities will inverse then solutions will be found.
When they inverse the priority, there are little reason to keep on using C++.
What seems to be happening today is that outside specific domains like HFT, games, embedded systems or stuff like CUDA where C/C++ is the king, nobody wants to write new code in C/C++ or at least starting new projects in the language, while fervently migrating safety critical code to Rust.
Even in those domains there are efforts to do things in Rust, although it's unclear when Rust is going to be an actually serious/viable option.
I suspect C++ will become less of a "mainstream" language but only relevant in those specific domains. OS / Services will consider alternatives first.
(2024)
In 2026, there really needs to be a REALLY good reason for people to use C++ for greenfield projects over using something like Rust, Go or C#. I mean, I've made it work, but that pretty much involves making a completely new build system AND test framework from scratch because C++ tooling is just that bad, because I swear I spent 2 days trying to setup CMake to get Skyrim modding setup, and in the end, I had to tap out and begrudgingly had Codex do it.
The other major problem for C++ is that correct C++ basically looks like nonsense, because the committee insists on pushing dangerous footguns that nobody sane would ever use in normal codebases through yet takes their sweet time with adding basic functionalities like pattern matching or even "print", which is somehow finally added in C++23. Worse still, nothing is ever really allowed to be removed/deprecated from C++, so you have decades of accumulated syntax debt that nobody is allowed to actually fix.
I think the biggest issue with C++ is that despite the fact that 90% of the language just should not be used in any normal code, period, there really is nothing that can replace C++ in its niche of high performance, low-level systems level programming. There is a good language buried underneath C++ somewhere, it's just that nobody has taken the time to extract it.
> There is a good language buried underneath C++ somewhere
Well.. "C".. though I wouldn't go so far as to call that a good language, either.
Lack of support for type-safe containers (need to be hack toghether via macros) and overreliance on macros in general (which are not IDE and debugger friendly) are two aspects of C that are off-putting for majority of people in 2026. That's even assuming you're willing to forego pointer/memory safety.
Indeed, picking C doesn't make sense when you actually want to write C++ code in C ;)
C++ at least rescues you from defining a million callbacks with a void* context argument that you then cast into whatever you know it actually is
Well, Carbon would have been better off if they just made "C with `match` and sane error handling" instead of whatever it is they are building there over at Google. But still, I think C and C++ are honestly very different languages at this point and that you can't really call C++ a superset of C at all really.
> There is a good language buried underneath C++ somewhere, it's just that nobody has taken the time to extract it.
Carbon?
Carbon isn't even a real language, no real language will spent 4 entire years and is still stuck in version 0.0.0-0. It feels more like bad Rust than a proper C++ successor at all.
Just to give you a small example? why would a C++ successor language use `fn main()` instead of using C/C++ style `int main()`? And their generics system is even more confusing, are they going to support a new form of generics or are they sticking with templates? And if they are going to add templates, why would they not add pretty much one of the best additions to modern C++ to Carbon, concepts?
> why would a C++ successor language use `fn main()` instead of using C/C++ style `int main()`
Apparently easier and faster parsing. Most modern language have arrived at the `fn bla(arg: ArgType): ResultType` form and I don't think they made that decision for purely aesthetical reasons.
Even C++ has. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/cpp/trailing-return-type-in-cp...
Has anyone major used that for any production project though?
No, it's C :) And for me that's not even a hot take anymore, I switched back to C (specifically C99 and later) around 2017 after nearly 20 years of C++ as my main language, and I don't miss C++ the slightest. The hardest part was unlearning some bad C++ habits. The other 'behaviour change' for me was to open my mind to more programming languages. E.g. instead of trying to solve every problem with C++ I now pick a language that better matches the problem I want to solve (e.g. on one end of my language toolbox is C, on the other extreme end is Typescript, and somewhere in the middle are Zig, on Mac of course the occasional ObjC (not a fan of Swift tbh), and yes, sometimes even still modern C++ - in the end, the choice of language is mostly driven by the dependencies you need to use).
> In 2026, there really needs to be a REALLY good reason for people to use C++ for greenfield projects over using something like Rust, Go or C#.
I don't think that professional developers go around mindlessly starting projects without evaluating their choices. The truth of the matter is that the whole industry has been picking C++ over alternatives for ages, to the point where C++ managed to get one of the most popular languages devised. Why do you think that happened?
> I mean, I've made it work, but that pretty much involves making a completely new build system AND test framework from scratch (...)
That says more about your competence than anything. I mean, CMake works so well that companies such as Jetbrains developed their C++ IDEs around it. But somehow you seem to struggle where everyone just dash towards coding. Why is that?