[fwsgonzo]

It is really only the fact that everyone writes C++ a little bit differently. From the outside this looks like C++ is a mess, but in reality, you can pick and choose what you like, and that's exactly what people do. You can be as safe or as unsafe as you need to be. That, of course, also opens the door for beginners to accidentally write unsafe code for a long time before they know all the footguns.

I think the real dent in C++ comes from wholesale improvements to languages by adding package management, one-liner built-in toolchains, built-in testing and build system. I could write paragraphs about why this is a good thing but we all know why.

CMake is making an effort in making it easy to fetch content for your build system, including Git repos, so there are paths to take today, but you need to learn a lot of separate things just to get started with C++. What are the chances that a beginners C++ tutorial gives you all the best practices in a way that a newer language does by default?

Learning C++ will probably look like the experience of using a web server with poor defaults, a strange configuration language, and thousands of different tutorials detailing a 20-year period of changes.

If I were to host content today I would not use Apache or nginx - I would probably start with Caddy and go from there.

[menaerus]

> improvements to languages by adding package management, one-liner built-in toolchains, built-in testing and build system. I could write paragraphs about why this is a good thing but we all know why.

Not everybody shares this sentiment. I think it's great to be able to get yourself up and running quickly, and start dabbling with the language immediately, but I also think that at the same it is not so great because there is no "one size fits all purpose". I, for instance, happen to value the latter more than the former.

[celrod]

FWIW, I also wrote a lot of C++ for the first time last year, and found the lack of

> package management, one-liner built-in toolchains, built-in testing and build system

To be by far the least pleasant things about the language, especially C++20 where things like concepts are wonderful to use, but then you can't rely on having a toolchain that actually supports it. The most recent xcode/Apple Clang do not, so on Mac you need to find your lib(std)c++ elsewhere.

It'd be great if there were at least some way to make this easy, e.g. to create a virtual environment that sets all paths correctly. Or if the compiler from a toolchain would default to using its own headers and libraries instead of defaulting to the system's. (I assume they don't for a combination of historical reasons, and that you'd then you may be unable to link to system libraries due to things like mismatched std libraries).

Preferably, there would also be a GitHub Action to do it to make CI easier to set up.

[menaerus]

> but then you can't rely on having a toolchain that actually supports it.

C++20 is still a bleeding edge so I'd advise you to pick C++17 or even C++14 if you want to have pleasant cross-platform coverage. That's what most companies with the goal of true cross-platform support will do. 3-year window time for compiler and library devs is really hard, especially given how many new features were introduced to C++20. And now consider how many different vendors there are ... https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support numers them 12 but it doesn't count the ones from embedded space for example and probably some other are missing too, so 20? What we want to see on the paper hardly can match the much more complex reality.

> The most recent xcode/Apple Clang do not

It's a PITA, as usually found with Apple, especially considering that all other major compilers including GCC, Clang, MSVC and ICC work just fine: https://godbolt.org/z/Mj6ehq57v

> so on Mac you need to find your lib(std)c++ elsewhere.

This wouldn't work because concepts aren't a library feature but a compiler feature so perhaps your best bet would be to see if you can use vanilla clang or GCC to compile the code on Apple machines. I am not an expert here.

[moloch-hai]

Generally it is the people coming from C or C++98 who write unsafe code. People picking up C++20 start out using it safely, and continue.