You're right, but dammit, I wish you weren't. A world in which we can evolve existing large C++ codebases gradually towards safety instead of having to RRiR is a better world.

There are lots of cool innovations C++ made that will just disappear from the Earth, forever, if C++ can't be made memory safe in the same sense Rust is. I mean, Rust doesn't even support template specialization.

I don't think it's too late for someone to fork both C++ and Clang and make something that's actually a good synthesis of the old and the new.

But yeah, the most likely future is one on which C++ goes the way of Fortran (which still gets regular updates, however irrelevant) and the energy goes into Rust. But I like to rage, rage, against the dying of the type based metaprogramming.

> I don't think it's too late for someone to fork both C++ and Clang and make something that's actually a good synthesis of the old and the new.

People have tried variants of this already: Carbon, for example. I don’t think anyone outside of Google uses it, though, and even within Google I suspect it’s dwarfed by regular C++.

I don’t think C++ will become irrelevant for a long time. Recent standards have added some cool new features (like std::expected), and personally I feel like the language is better than ever (a biased opinion obviously).

Memory management is still a huge elephant in the room, but I don’t think it’s becoming irrelevant.

FWIW, Rust doesn't have specialization yet because they're really hard to get right without introducing new undefined behaviors.

This doesn't mean that it's not possible to achieve a safe subset of C++ that supports template specialization, but it suggests that we aren't going to see it any time soon.

Well like you said, Fortran didn't actually go anywhere. Fortan 77 is a terrible programming language, but you can't seriously claim it "disappeared from the Earth".

Not that long ago tsoding was like "I should learn Fortran" and wrote a bunch of Fortran. Obviously from his perspective some things about Fortran are awful because it's very old, but it wasn't somehow impossible to do.

There are a few really amazing things which have been achieved in C++ like fmt, a compile time checked, userspace library for arbitrarily formatting variadic generic parameters. That's like man on the moon stuff, genuinely impressive. Mostly though C++ is a garbage fire and so while it's important to learn about it and from it we should not keep doing that.

> fork both C++ and Clang

Great! What are you waiting for?

If you try to answer that question, you'll also find why other similar projects are not finding much traction yet.