I agree that ideally everything should be written in safer alternatives, in most scenarios is not feasible to migrate from C++ to another language, because of the code base size.

I think cppfront[0] is the way to go if you want to write a safer language on top of C++, you can watch the talk about it here[1].

[0] https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELeZAKCN4tY

There is a good reason I'm not migrating to rust: I have 15million lines of C++ that we have written over the years, for a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars (probably over a billion by now). There is no way we can migrate to rust for less than more hundreds of millions, there is also the loss of new features that our competition can add while we are doing the migration effort.

I'm looking at how to fit rust into our project, but it isn't easy. I can report already that bad programmers in rust write worse code than great programmers in C++...

Often not possible when working on existing C++ codebase. C++ is here to stay...

Why would you migrate from a language full of :: and <> and {} which forces you to think about weird concepts about memory, ownership, sharing and pointers, to migrate to a very similar language?

It's like stopping huffing paint to start huffing petrol.