Not that this invalidates your broader point about Safe C++, but this particular issue could also be solved by Rust shipping clang / a frontend that can also compile C and C++.
It was so much easier (for me; I am bad at build systems) that I plan to do that for future projects.
There’s just something about `cargo run`…
pip install rust
If you were worried about clang flag stability not being as stable as Rust, you could also include clang as part of llvm-tools. This would add an extra step to set up, but is still easier than today.
Of course, in both cases there’s still the work of having rust up (or rustc, depending on the strategy) set up the sysroot. I’m not saying this is trivial to do, but it would make cross compilation so much better than today, and bring rust to parity with Zig and Go on this front.