[pjc50]

> I'm curious if somebody is working on a flavor of the modern C++ that abandons backward compatibility ?

This is just Rust. You can't really deprecate bare pointers in C++ without completely wrecking the language.

[HALtheWise]

This... seems false? In particular, the point of an "edition" system is that code written for the new edition can seamlessly import code written for the old edition, and so a hypothetical pointerless "new edition" would simply disallow bare pointers in new files, and things like smart pointers would continue to be _implemented_ in old edition code.

[steveklabnik]

Bringing editions to C++ failed, and I am not aware of anyone trying to tackle the issues https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/631

(I could be wrong though! I follow the committee more than you may guess, but not as much as to think I know everything about what's going on.)

[pjc50]

> would simply disallow bare pointers in new files

And all their header files. That's a real Year Zero moment: you've just cut yourself off from the standard library, as well as most of the code you might want to link to. I don't think there's any "simpler" about it.