ORorbifold·Nov 8, 2018
Maybe just to elaborate: In contrast to rust, C++ is a standard defined language, with >3 mature and competitive implementations, two of which (clang / microsofts compiler) provide excellent tooling and support for refactoring (clang in particular) beyond any other language in existence (maybe except Java). Instead of looking at cppreference.com, maybe consider browsing https://github.com/isocpp/CppCoreGuidelines/blob/master/CppC... the Cpp Core Guidelines, this outlines a forward looking vision of how good c++ code should look like.
A lot of the static guarantees that rust provides can be modelled in C++ as well, see for example "https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy/checks/cppcoreguidel.... Eventually someone will write a rust-style borrow checker as a clang analysis pass. Already now it is possible to express a lot of
compile time pr
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operties cleanly in c++, with features such as constexpr lambdas, static_assert etc. Additional features such as Concepts / meta-classes / modules will improve C++ expressivity even further.
In short, yes C++ has a lot of stuff and everyone knows that it is hard to get a grip on all its features and misfeatures. But there has been a continuous effort to rectify and improve on its short comings. See for example https://clang.llvm.org/extra/clang-tidy/checks/list.html for a list of clang based code transformations that are able to automatically improve your c++ code.
The way I see it, just because of legacy reasons (I can interface with the majority of commercial software developed in the last 30 years (CAD, EDA software, Houdini, Abelton, ...)), tooling reasons (the rust compiler is a slow hot mess, compared to the state of the art c++ compilers) and momentum (there is a large incentive to continuously improve c++, because it is the foundation of a large fraction of commercial software out there) it is unlikely that rust will outcompete c++ in a significant way in the long run.
To close of with an example the lean theorem prover https://github.com/leanprover/lean, implemented in C++ handily beats the 20+ year old Coq prover. One of its key features is multicore support. If you look into its implementation details, the equivalent rust code would have to work around a lot of rust "safety" features, essentially because in many cases it is hard to convince a hardcoded heuristic like a borrow checker that whatever you are doing is safe. The static guarantees that rust gives wouldn't help you at all in correctly implementing some of the very involved algorithms a theorem prover kernel has to implement, while standing in the way of the implementation being straightforward. This leaves aside the obvious tooling (you can use Visual Studio, good profilers and debuggers) and integration (SAT checkers like Z3, LLVM backend) advantages.