I'm not sure this is true. It has been a year since the last really significant change to the language, whereas C++ is adding Ranges, Concepts, Modules, and so on and so on. The pace of change has slowed way down in Rust and sped way up in C++, it almost feels like C++ is moving "faster" now or they are at least close to matching pace.
But a lot of the Rust efforts at the moment are really just closing holes in the language - things that you would expect to be able to do, but haven't been able to do due to compiler limitations. Generic Associated Types and Const Generics both kind of fall into that category. The rate of true "new feature" development is way down.
Yes. Rust is complicated, but the compiler is unusually good at telling you what you did wrong. Before it results in a crash.
The underlying problem with C/C++ is that it still doesn't have a decent array story. " char * " is so 1970s. That can't be fixed without breaking so much. All you can do is try to paper over the problem with templates. But the mold always seeps through the wallpaper. Look at the example in the original posting that reads:
FILE* fp = fopen(fname.c_str(), "r");
There have been a few different projects aiming to introduce 'proper arrays' into C, but they never get traction, even when carefully designed for good backward compatibility. C is seemingly just too resistant to change. Here's Walter Bright's suggestion. [0]
Aside: why is the word story so popular on Hacker News these days? We can just say C doesn't have decent arrays. We aren't discussing its history, we're discussing a specific technical facet of the language.
[0] https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/C-biggest-mistake.html
C++ got off on a weird I/O direction. That
file << item << item;
It’s a little bit of a peeve of mine that people just decided on new languages instead. But it is what it is, and I am probably not knowledgeable enough to really judge.
The trouble is, if every new version is _technically_ its own new language, and if you have to break compatibility a little, why not just break a lot and fix everything?
It's not like C++ was ever known for ABI stability anyway.
There is a lot of old code that will never be rewritten but is still valuable, and I believe we will waste a lot of time just language-shifting entire ecosystems as new languages come and go.
Look at python 2 to 3. There are still packages out there on python 2 that haven’t been migrated. And thats mostly the same language!
(Note that my view is colored somewhat because I am a scientific programmer)