The compiler design is definitely becoming more complicated but the language design has become progressively more efficient and nicer to use. I’ve been using C++20 for a long time in production; it has been problem-free for years at this point. It is not strictly complete, e.g. modules still aren’t usable, but you don’t need to wait for that to use it.

Even C++23 is largely usable at this point, though there are still gaps for some features.

gcc seems to have full C++20, almost everything in 23 and and implemented reflection for 26 which is probably the only thing anyone cares about in 26.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support.html

Funny how gcc seems to be the top dog now, what happened to clang? Thought their codebase was supposed to be easier and more pleasant to work with? Or maybe just more hardcore compiler devs work on gcc?

Relfection was a desperate need. Useful and difficult to design feature.

There are also things like template for or inplace_vector. I think it has useful things. Just not all things are useful to everyone.

> For low level stuff plain C

The nice thing about C++ is that you can more or less turn it into C, if you want. My C++ code is closer to C than idiomatic, modern C++, but I wouldn't want to miss the nice parts that C++ adds, such as lambda functions and the occasional template for generalization. Pretty much the only thing I'm missing from C are order-independent designated initializers, which became order-dependent in C++, and thus useless.

> "Haven't seen anything I'd rather used" reads like "Haven't gotten over the initial learning curve with any other tool"

What an odd thing to say. I simply don't like certain design decisions in other languages that I've checked out and tried, and therefore do not see any reason to switch. E.g. I tried Rust, but it's absolutely terrible for quick&dirty prototyping, which is my main job.