I feel like he is missing the boat here. C++ is on a path to dying as a language because of a lack of safety features, and he’s talking about zero cost abstractions. Exceptions cause massive compiler issues and are hardly zero cost anyway, I don’t know how he can compare them at all to std::expected. Also anyone who has worked in an exception heavy codebase can attest to the fact that they do not lead to simpler code.

I have worked with C++ almost every day for a decade now, and I’ll be sad to see it go. This is not what the thought leaders should be focusing on at all. If you’re unhappy with std:: expected just don’t use it? Why can’t we focus on fixing the thousands of security vulnerabilities that cause real harm and money and endless developer time to try to work around.

All this recent safety talk is so strange to me, also a decade-long cpp dev. I read all this drama and worries, but that never relates to worries I experienced with the language. I've only ever seen safety issues with absurdly bad and old code that would never go past static analysis anyways, let alone a code review.

Real issues for my peers and myself are things like the thirst for reflections, the thirst for throwing out old garbage. Certain gripes with language details like initialization, the way a few things have been implemented etc.

I genuinely feel puzzled by the topics of all these cpp posts. Is everyone coding ultra low level with tooling from 1999?

I want to use std::expected because I want clear, explicit error handling, not performance.

There is a time and place for performance optimized code - but usually where the hot loop is well known, and its a tiny minority of the program.

Well theres been like 3 C++ drama posts in the last 2 weeks detailing that the standards committee is definitely not heading towards a comprehensive safety solution. They have “profiles” which is a nothingburger, and they’re sticking to it.