The forever backwards compatible promise of C++ was a tremendous design mistake that has resulted in mindshare death as of 2026. It might suck to have to modify your code to continue to get it to work, but it’s the right long term approach.

Rust has managed just fine to remain mostly backwards compatible since 1.0 , while still allowing for evolution of the language through editions.

This puts much more work on the compiler development side, but it's a great boon for the ecosystem.

To be fair, zig is pre 1.0, but Zig is also already 8 years old. Rust turned 1.0 at ~ 5 years, I think.

Mindshare death is a very large overstatement given the massive amount of legacy C++ out there that will be maintained by poor souls for year to come. But you are right, there used to be a great language hiding within C++ if the committee ever dared to break backwards compat. But even if they did it now it would be too late and they'd just end up with a worse Rust or Zig.

There is a reason GCC, LLVM, CUDA, Metal, HPC,.. rely on C++ and will never rewrite to something else, including Zig.

Hilariously, they broke this compatibility. std::auto_ptr was an abomination, but removing it from the language was needless and undermined the long term stability that differentiates C++ from upstarts.