The fact that many large and lucrative code bases are written in c++ should disabuse you of the idea that c++ is suicidal.
And is a fine example of path dependence.
No one can write a browser in any other language not because C++ is necessarily better but because the activation energy to bootstrap to a useful browser is so large (for example, one must provide a smoking fast Javascript engine before one even considers the web page rendering pipeline).
It will be interesting to see how much of the Firefox codebase gets taken over by Rust as time passes.
My point is: maybe C++ actually _is_ the superior language. It can't be a coincidence that all the best software projects tend to be written in C++, and not in Haskell or whatever.
Because I often work with Qt, I'm comparing it with QString, which is much more than a vector of chars. https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qstring.html
I used std::string and QString extensively for 4-5 years and find QString inexplicably bloated and un-intuitive for my use cases.
And QString had no magic to it other than wrapping its underlying data in ytf-16 which std::u16string does too.
It's not perfect but it gets the job done, IIRC.
Curious here. Are you speaking from experience -- i.e. you tried and failed -- or is this simply something you guess must be true? People write high-performance software in Haskell, and it's their tool of choice.
I've heard of those but have never managed to see one. Do you have some examples ? (to give you my "baseline" - handling >500k messages/second on a desktop cpu for instance as this is something quite easily achievable in C++)
If we're going by best software written, I suspect that means C is the better language than C++ by a wide margin. It would be interesting as to whether Visual Basic would be superior on that axis as well.
C++ is the better language--except that we always have to expose a C FFI because nobody seems to have enough critical mass to stabilize the library ABI. C++ is the better language--except that Apple wrote another language because they don't believe that and that Mozilla wrote Rust because C++ wasn't good enough. C++ is the better language--as long as you have a new codebase that only uses the latest features and Satan help you if you have stuff from pre-2005 because God won't be enough. C++ is the better language--as long as compile time isn't an issue.
I can go on if you wish...
I don't think C++ developers are stupid and those choosing to start new projects in it generally have really good reasons for doing so. I also think that many older projects are in C or C++ via path dependence because C++ was the superior choice when the project started and now they have far too much code to switch.
I also believe this will be why Rust eventually becomes a very important language--Rust allows you to modernize that old codebase in a piecemeal fashion.