I certainly don’t disagree with you there (about ease-of-use vs safety). I personally believe the “right” choice in C++ is to err on the side of safety (at least when adding new stuff), and wish STL did too — especially given how notoriously difficult it is to write C++ code that isn’t plagued with memory corruption bugs

I know anything other than switching to Rust is a losing battle of compromises in some sense, but many of us working with huge codebases written in C++ don’t have the luxury of that choice being unavailable.