It's really crazy how much C++ has already evolved since the start of my career (with C++98). C++ has been the millennium falcon of languages; creaky and old, not pretty to look at, but still good where it counts.

That said, I completely switched over to rust many months ago and rarely look back. Rust is a tribute to C++, an incorporation of lessons learned that sheds all of the baggage C++ will never be rid of. Rust also has less of learning curve than C++ (although both are quite high), simply because C++ has so many odds and ends to keep track of these days.

Rust has also made me realize how bad class based OO is as an abstraction. OO glues together operator overloading, methods, inheritance, all into one package. Rust breaks those concepts into component parts that provide much better abstractions with less keywords and jargon to worry about.