> Equating C and C++ must seem compelling when one is exposed to C++ as it is written at Mozilla and at Google. Both places enforce coding standards that require programming under what amount to 1990s conventions, with a few modern tricks added. The consequence is that you get few of the benefits of modern C++, but all the costs.

That's just not true. Both organizations use "modern C++" everywhere. The new C++ proposals tend to come from large companies such as Google, after all.

People tend to assume that every new release of C++ will automatically solve all the problems with the previous releases until proven otherwise. This has always mystified me. Nobody has demonstrated that any new version of C++ has been able to stem the flood of memory safety problems.

It's interesting that few people can actually articulate why modern C++ supposedly solves the memory safety issues, other than just mentioning smart pointers. Smart pointers actually do very little--shared_ptr can bump reference counts sometimes and that's about it--and what little benefit comes from smart pointers is generally outweighed by all the new ways to get use-after-free in modern C++. Free happens invisibly in subtle places in modern C++, while in C free happens explicitly when you write "free()", which tends to be safer. In my opinion, modern C++ is significantly less safe than classic C++, which is in turn significantly less safe than C.