That's the key concept here. When tightening up the defaults, an "edition" mechanism is a good solution.
Now we need this for C/C++, which have much legacy stuff which ought to go away for new code. This is more feasible than it used to be, because "Convert this Edition 4 code to Edition 5" is something LLMs can do now.
I'd never seen all the rules for SQLite soft typing written out before. Those are more complicated than strong typing.
P1881 Epochs proposed to WG21 (the C++ standards committee) in 2019 by Vittorio Romeo
The committee found plenty of problems with this, and made it clear that if Vittorio did all the hard work to resolve those problems they would find more, P1881 was abandoned.
There was a Reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1tja9zr/c_profiles_a_c... which suggested that the "Profiles" idea Bjarne is pushing for C++ 29 could be used to deliver this.
So, you're not the first person to notice that this is a good idea, P1881 was written after Rust's 2018 Edition, but before 2021 Edition with its even more significant improvements. I firmly believe Rust's Editions unlock not only technical possibilities (though it does certainly do that) it unlocks an appetite from users which is good for your ecosystem.
In C++, certainly. In C, though, what do you not do in C23 that you was doing in C99?
"Modern C" by 1999 already included "Don't use gets()"
Even if you're in one of those unconventional settings (say, a bare-metal microcontroller or something), you'd probably still start from edition 2026 and mutate your settings accordingly, rather than using the defaults that are 26 years old.
Given how many projects are potentially out there effectively relying on the current settings, and SQLite's general attitude to backwards compatibility, that would likely not be considered a good idea. Opting in with an edition flag for new (or updating) projects does seem like a good solution to this to serve all of old, active, and new projects, but it would increase potential bug surface area and therefor testing requirements, and the existing setting do allow all that to be opted in/out to/from already (and it is only four settings we are talking about here).
That FKs being enforced is set per-connection rather than at the database level is something that surprised me a lot when I found out. A way of setting that at DB creation (or via ALTER DATABASE after) seems like quite an omission because if you have multiple potential routes that can update the same DB any one of them could cause serious the others will encounter.