While I call myself literate in C++, I often chuckle when I see the latest round of C++ features in a new draft. I can write C++, but not using all the stuff introduced in my lifetime.

I have no idea how anyone could ever keep up with all this stuff. The language spec just grows ever larger each year. It's just far too much.

Imagine if all the authors of C++ compilers got together for an international symposium and some catastrophe struck. Like a gas leak causes an explosion and they all die tragically. I could absolutely see the language transitioning to being an anachronism. All the knowledge to actually work on the language implementation would be lost. We could still maintain existing software in C++ for a while, but eventually we'd even need to use legacy systems just to host the compilers.

C would really need some serious overhaul as it still can’t be used to implement even the most basics of zero-cost abstractions, like sane strings or a vector. So I’m not sure it’s a great example.