I think it's kind of awkward either way. The standard committee keeps adding new features to the language to address common pain points in the industry. But many people don't have that much time to learn the new features, and hates it when seeing something in the code but can't intuitively understand what it's doing. I once witnessed a 10+ year C++ coder (that had been immersed in some old C++ code base for many years) seeing a piece of C++14 code for the first time -- he said it reads like an entirely different language, not the C++ he's familiar with at all.

> std::indirect looks for me like another pointless c++ thing that already works with forward pointer declaration. You can add it to another ton of pointless things C++ adds without fixing the old ones.

For me your comment seems pointless, because std::indirect have a precise and clear problem which it solves. And this is totaly not a "hackery fix of language drawback". In this case language works as intended and std::indirect just close the gap for facility which is still would be written by hands, if there is no std::indirect.

Part of the problem is that features are not added fully

This here should not need to happen:

> document that moved-from objects cannot be used

It's moved from, so of course it cannot be used. Shouldn't have to add an assertion in every method to guard a fundamental invariant.

I think point was another. And even if u are right - this is a silly point. In any general language you have enormous amount of ways to write something. I'm at least implemented pimpl in two different ways (despite lot of little quircks): classic pimpl with heap allocated implementation and fastpimpl which accepts size as compile time argument and create implementation directly in local stack buffer.

> In large codebases you will now have to deal with all three solutions being used, depending on how old the code is.

this is really a problem of "large codebases" and not C++ complexity. If people writing badly organized code.. than.. nothing will help them. Even such string language as Rust.

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But, I go aside. I can be wrong here, but this is how I see this: - author author worked with C++ early in his career - now his work with something like python or javascript or "promptscript" or don't programming at all - he managed to taste C++ drawbacks - now he reading such article just to see "what's new" in technology he was interested in the past. - he see something what he don't understand from first sight - this looks like a complex and quirky thing => he decide that problem in the language, not in his incompetence in this area

I see such comments very often and usually people don't provide any technical expertise. But just their feeling that "oh, this thing was so complex, now it even more complex".

The article's point of view is that using unique_ptr to implement a PIMPL idiom is inadequate since it doesn't allow copying of the outer type without implementing your own dedicated operators. Hence the new type which does act more like a value, leaving the decision to have the outer class move-only or copyable up to that class, without needing to write any special code.

The point of each improvement is fewer easily-made errors. Having implicit deep copying handled avoids lots of errors with manually implementing it the oldest way.

Is it actually simpler, though? The unfortunate reality of this world is the fact that C++ is not the latest standard of the language or the newest shiny library, it's all of them at the same time. Adding a new way of doing the same thing decreases complexity only if you migrate all of the existing code, which nobody ever does.