alt Hacker News> I wonder if C++ has some hairy concepts and syntax today on par with Rust's more difficult parts.
… … … … Unqualified name lookup has been challenging in C++ since even before C++11. Overload resolution rules are so painful that it took me weeks to review a patch simply because I had to back out of trying to make sense of the rules in the standard. There's several slightly different definitions of initialization. If you really want to get in the weeds, starting playing around with std::launder and std::byte and strict aliasing rules and lifetime rules, and you'll yearn for the simplicity of Rust.
C++ is the absolute most complex of any of the languages whose specifications I have read, and that's before we get into the categories of things that the standard just gives up on.
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The right strategy to use C++ efficiently is to set warnings to the maximum as errors and take the core guidelines or similar and avoid past cruft.
More often than not (except if you inherit codebases but clang has a modernize tool) most of the cruft is either avoidable or caught by analyzers. Not all.
But overall, I feel that C++ is still one of the most competitive languages if you use it as I said and with a sane build system and package manager.
Unless you're writing a compiler, you should require the author of the patch to explain why it works.
> starting playing around with std::launder and std::byte and strict aliasing rules and lifetime rules, and you'll yearn for the simplicity of Rust
Annotations like std::launder, lifetime manipulation, etc solve a class of problems that exist in every systems language. They inform the compiler of properties that cannot be known by analyzing the code. Rust isn't special in this regard, it has the same issues.
Without these features, we either relied on unofficial compiler-specific behavior or used unnecessarily conservative code that was safe but slower.