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Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

A bit more if we consider the "bugfixing" release that was C++14 :)

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?

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a member of the c++ committee (herb sutter) is writing an compiler for an alternative c++ syntax [0], to c++, with the intent to restrict some semantics of the language for less UB, surprises, etc. i think less implementation-defined behavior is incredibly important; rvo vs std::move, dynamic function call optimization, i wish i didn't have to search asm to check for...

[0]: https://github.com/hsutter/cppfront

While I share the sentiment, compare C#14 with C# 1.0, Java 25 with Java 1.0, Python 3.14 with Python 1.0.

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"

https://youtu.be/p52mNWsh-qs?si=AEs1dtr6_iknzATv

> nor there is support for binary libraries.

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.

Rust does, Rust editions do not have a story for them.

The story is that it must not matter which edition a library was compiled with - it's the boundary layer at which different editions interoperate with eachother.

Provided everything is available in source code, there are no semantic changes on the boundary level, or standard library types being used on the library public API that changed across editions.

No. Not provided any of that. Must not matter really does mean "must not matter" here.

How do you link two crates together, each compiled with a distinct edition, whose public API is incompatible across editions?

There is no such thing as "crates whose public API is incompatible across editions".

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