As someone who's familiar with Rust, but not at all with C++, can you elaborate on what situations Rust is less expressive than C++ in?
My naïve guess is high performance data structures with reference cycles?
My naïve guess is high performance data structures with reference cycles?
And indeed C++ templates are a lot more like Rust macros than Rust generics: They're turing-complete.
Joint with some interesting language choices like SFINAE (substitution failure is not an error), you end up with the ability to specialize functions, methods and whole classes in C++.
You can also have functions that return different types.
C++ templates work like duck-typing within a static language: In Rust you need to say what traits your generics need to support. In C++ it will try and substitute and if it fails (say, because T doesn't support the required methods) it will try another substitution until none are left.
If none of the substitutions work, you will be shown ALL of them in error reporting: This is what leads to pages and pages of compile errors of single-character typos in C++.
Templates are really cool, but also pretty confusing when reading code since you're in a guessing game of what types will fit the constraints imposed by the _implementation_ of the function.
From C++20 there's concepts to make templates work a little smoother.
There's been whole books written about how to abuse templates: these are pre-requisite knowledge when working in large codebases.
Another one, with a more limited audience, is data models where object ownership and lifetimes are inherently indeterminate at compile-time. Since C++ allows you to design your own safety models, since they are opt-in and not built into the compiler, you can provide traditional ownership semantics (e.g. the equivalent of std::unique_ptr) without exposing the mechanics of how ownership or lifetimes are resolved at runtime. Metaprogramming plays a significant role in making this transparent.
Those are the two the matter the most for my purposes. They save an enormous amount of code and bugs. Rust has a litany of other gaps (lack of proper thread local, placement new, et al) but I don't run into those cases routinely.
The data structure thing you mention would be annoying but to be honest I rarely design data structures like this. For performance, most data structures tend to rely on clever abuse of arrays.