Between this and Bjarne Stroustrup panic leaked email to C++ standards committee members, it's going to be interesting for Rust's future.
There are several domains where C++ never managed to displace C, and likewise the same seems bound to happen with Rust towards C and C++, regardless of safety improvements.
Khronos API definitions, the whole GPGPU ecosystem including vendor tooling, all major runtimes and compiler frameworks, consoles devkits, are few domains where Rust has yet to have a presence.
In 40 years, we have GCC and LLvM. How long until something comes along to displace them in any language? Nobody is really trying to “rewrite it in Rust” the LLVM platform (even though Rust itself relies on it). There is Cranelift of course but it is not really trying to be LLVM.
> The demands for memory safety are not unreasonable, in fact, I consider them too feeble for the long term, so responding to the demands is in the interest of C++
> The sky isn’t falling, but unless we act now and get C++ onto a track supporting a flexible framework of profiles (supporting various forms of safety), we risk a painful decline.
He's simply making the case for profiles and trying to rally the people he works with around that as a necessary goal. That's something that any leadership has to do from time to time. That's also something he's done before when he warned everyone about proposing a bunch of incompatible features with no clear vision. Nothing unexpected here, in no way is this "panicking".