I haven't tried writing C(++) in ages, but what recall being a giant irritant was the tooling.
Writing simple programs was fine enough, but the whole matter of linking libraries and writing Make files was a headache.
Writing simple programs was fine enough, but the whole matter of linking libraries and writing Make files was a headache.
Build and testing tooling is one thing that younger languages have generally done much better. Rust, Go, Dart and others all have standard build tools integrated with the language that scale to large projects, with standard testing frameworks integrated with those tools. Scripting languages like Python have import features within the language itself. Much lower cognitive overhead.
But if you (1) choose a single OS, (2) have "few" (say under 20) files and (3) rely only on OS-provided libraries, then things are actually pretty simple. For example, you only support Ubuntu 20.04 or Fedora 39. Then your makefiles are nice and easy to read, and you just rely on pkg-config for the libraries.