Between how long it took us to get standard library hardening in C++ and seeing what ISO did to the co-founder of MPEG, I'm convinced ISO is fundamentally incapable of actually being responsive to stakeholders, specifically because of the insane national body vetocracy.

For context, under Leonardo Chiariglione's stewardship, MPEG attempted to ship a royalty-free codec called Internet Video Coding (IVC) and it was immediately torpedoed by Samsung claiming ownership. In any sane environment you would amend the standard to remove the claimed technology, but ISO specifically does not allow you to do this. There is no obligation for an ISO participant to identify the patents being claimed unless they refuse to offer a license on FRAND terms. Ergo, Samsung just said "we own this and will sell licenses for money", and IVC was dead in the water as a standard[0].

Leonardo attempted to bring this to the attention of ISO, but the actual formal process for this was blocked by... you guessed it, a national body vetoing it. So the patent policy that prohibits ISO from distinguishing between royalty-free and royalty-bearing codecs stayed. Oh, and then they cut MPEG up into six pieces so Leonardo would have nothing to run anymore.

C++ was an unusual language in that, for about 10-15 years, the only other competing systems programming language was C - another ISO standard, and the one C++ was originally based off of. The standard answer to "but I want memory safety" was "use a garbage collector"[1]. I distinctly remember hearing interviews with compiler developers talking about how adding even these basic features to C++ would be interminably painful, because you'd inevitably have to debug some deeply nested macro in a library somewhere, so shut up and just enjoy that we gave you Vector<T>.at().

The day Rust becomes an ISO standard is the day it becomes dead to me.

[0] IVC was specifically designed to be inferior to the royalty-bearing H.265 standard, as Leonardo himself wanted to keep the royalty-free codecs second-tier.

[1] To be clear, there was research into non-GC languages with memory safety - that's where Rust got its ideas from - but it was a very small niche until Mozilla put their feet down and gave legitimacy to something.

Re: [1] - correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I remember, Rust originally did have GC and relied on it for safety, but as development went on, they added more static checks and eventually, very late into pre-alpha phase, realized they don't actually depend on GC anymore and can cut it out? As in, Rust wasn't part of the non-GC safety research at all, it just happened organically?