[cue_the_strings]

I'd say C++ at this point in time. It's getting better by the day, yet it has decades of high quality projects and libs you can rely on. Each new version is better than the last. It may be irritating that few things are ever hard-deprecated, and you have to keep a list of current best practices. On the other hand, concepts, ranges, previously auto and constexpr, are all godsend and make for an expressive language that's still very powerful.

With Rust, depending on what you're working on, you may lose almost no time integrating C and C++ (with an extern C interface) libraries, or you may lose 50% of it. Sure, you don't have to know CMake at least (which is a hard requirement for C++ nowadays), but using any extraordinary library dependency in Rust may prove to be a nightmare. Essentially: if someone else didn't already package it, prepare to lose some serious time. The language is nice, but the ecosystem is immature.

Things are probably going to change, and Rust will become more viable over time, but C++ is also improving at a rapid pace so I guess Rust will never completely outcompete it.

[omegalulw]

One of the core benefits of C++ is that it is a high level language that's still super close to the hardware. Switching from C++ to other languages, if you have mastered C++, should largely be a question of "what things are automatically done for me" which is very different from "what are these new things I need to do" that you have to deal with when you switch between other languages.

[umanwizard]

> One of the core benefits of C++ is that it is a high level language that's still super close to the hardware.

This is also the main selling point of Rust, IMO.