[shadowgovt]

C++ has grown several language tools to let you write reliable, safe code.

... But it can't shed the old stuff without breaking backwards compatibility, and that's what bites you. The fact that smart pointers exist now doesn't stop a developer from passing around non -const char* with no size specifier and calling that a "buffer," and because the language is so old and accreted most of its safety features later, the shortest way to express an idea tends to be the likeliest way to be subtly wrong.

This is really just a problem that other languages don't have because they didn't have the same starting point.

[_0w8t]

The problem is that there is a lot of code and libraries using older patterns. And modern C++ is sufficiently different from the older C++ to constitute effectively a new language while still being unsafe. Moreover, in an attempt to address the efficiency the language has added views and ranges that provides more ways to corrupt memory. So why rewrite libraries in modern C++ when you can port them to Rust or Go and gain memory safety?

[ncmncm]

It can't shed the old stuff, but it is very, very suspicious -- smelly -- when any of it appears in new code.

[shadowgovt]

It's smelly if you have enough people on the team to know what new code versus old code smells like.

If your developers are coming to the table with some C++ tutorial books written a decade ago, good luck. Invest in a decent linter and opinionated format checker.