[steveklabnik]

The C++ community is talking about evolving in the following ways in this space:

  1. contracts
  2. profiles
  3. successor languages
  4. borrow checking

The idea of a "subset of the language" is one that's often talked about, but there seems to be an explicit rejection of the idea of a subset, at least by several important committee members. It's not clear to me why this is the case.

[kosolam]

I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. The committee members have clear interest to keep things as they are. However, from a practical perspective I suspect that “subset lang” will happen. One just needs a linter or compiler flags to do that.

[steveklabnik]

It's all good, I have too much karma anyway.

The thing is, there's a difference between a true subset and "some flags that reject certain things." Because that creates a number of different sets that may relate to each other in a variety of ways, some subsets, some overlapping.

But beyond the specific definitions here, "profiles" is that sort of approach, so something like it will happen, probably. It seems to have a lot of support.

[ryandrake]

"Subset language" is already an option. The developer can choose a safe(r) subset of C++ to constrain themselves to. Many (most?) C++ shops already do this, and go to varying lengths to enforce that only their blessed subset is used. We don't really need a committee to create a new "subset language" to accomplish this.