[midnightclubbed]

You don't 'have' to keep up with the language and I don't know that many people try to keep up with every single new feature - but it is worse to be one of those programmers for whom C++ stopped at C++03 and fight any feature introduced since then (the same people generally have strong opinions about templates too).

There are certainly better tools for many jobs and it is important to have languages to reach for depending on the task at hand. I don't know that anything is better than C++ for performance sensitive code.

[imron]

I’ve been using c++ since the late 90’s but am not stuck there.

I was using c++11 when it was still called c++0x (and even before that when many of the features were developing in boost).

I took a break for a few years over c++14, but caught up again for c++17 and parts of c++20...

Which puts me 5-6 years behind the current state of things and there’s even more new features (and complexity) on the horizon.

I’m supportive of efforts to improve and modernize c++, but it feels like change didn’t happen at all for far too long and now change is happening too fast.

The ‘design by committee’ with everyone wanting their pet feature plus the kitchen sink thrown in doesn’t help reduce complexity.

Neither does implementing half-baked features from other ‘currently trendy’ languages.

It’s an enormous amount of complexity - and maybe for most code there’s not that much extra actual complexity involved but it feels overwhelming.

[layer8]

It’s okay to be a few years behind the standard, the compilers tend to be as well.

[imron]

Yeah, the issue is more that the perceived complexity means I’m less interested in investing time to catch it all back up

[TinkersW]

If you already used C++20 you aren't meaningfully behind, very little of interest has been introduced since then, and much of it isn't usable yet because of implementation issues.

[imron]

I’ve touched on some of c++20, but haven’t used it extensively.

Specifically here are areas I haven’t used that appear to have nontrivial amounts of complexity, footguns, syntax and other things to be aware of:

* Ranges * Modules * Concepts * Coroutines

Each of these is a large enough topic that it will involve time and effort to reach an equivalent level of competence and understanding that I have with other areas of c++.

I don’t mind investing time learning new things but with commentary around the web (and even this thread) calling the implementation and syntax a hot mess, at some point it’s a better investment to put that learning in to a language without all the same baggage.

I really wish c++ had gone with breaking change epochs for c++20.