It took 13 years to get C++11, actually.
Go's discussion is interesting, given how much programming language design history, and flaws of existing languages, they ignore to this day.
Go's discussion is interesting, given how much programming language design history, and flaws of existing languages, they ignore to this day.
But yeah it makes sense, given how that was the jumpstart of the whole modernization of the language. I believe it was a big undertake that required the time it took. Still years have passed and footguns keep accumulating... it wouldn't hurt to have a mechanism to optionally drop the old cruft from the language. Otherwise everything stacks on top in the name of backwards compatibility, but at this pace, how will C++36 look like?
While C++ might be worse, when you have 300+ doing proposals every three years, others aren't safer from similar churn, even if on smaller volume, and trying to keep backwards compatibility going.
And we all know what happened in Python.
Also Rust editions contrary to what many think, only cover a specific set of language evolution scenarios, it isn't anything goes, nor there is support for binary libraries.
As for a better C++, contrary to C, where it is business as usual, there are actually people trying to sort things out on WG21, even if isn't as well as we would like to.
"Making C++ Safe, Healthy, and Efficient - CppCon 2025"
This is a weird call-out because it's both completely incorrect and completely irrelevant to the larger point.
Rust absolutely supports binary libraries. The only way to use a rust library with the current rust compiler is to first compile it to a binary format and then link to it.
More so than C++ where header files (and thus generics via templates) are textual.
Cargo, the most common build system for rust, insists on compiling every library itself (with narrow exceptions - that include for instance the precompiled standard library that is used by just about everyone). That's just a design choice of cargo, not the language.