[arjonagelhout]

Although there are excellent alternatives to C++ such as Rust, C++ is still widely used as many open-source and commercial codebases are built with it.

Adding features to a language that is still actively used does not seem like a bad thing.

[bitexploder]

The amount of C++ written at my company every day is… a lot. We are slowly fighting away from it towards memory safety, but it is hard. It will take a decade.

[arjonagelhout]

At the company I currently work for we also use C++, and I am quite proficient in it. But the amount of times I have slowed myself down by simple lifetime issues makes me want to switch to a more memory safe language. Whether that is C++ with profiles or a whole new language such as Rust.

For example, a week back I lost a few hours finding a segfault bug in C++ code, which ended up being a trivial lifetime error: I used a reference after it was invalidated due to a std::vector resize.

These kind of errors should be compile time errors, rather than hard to trace runtime errors.

How does your company go about changing to memory safety? Are new projects / libraries written in Rust for example? Do projects / libraries get (partially) rewritten?

[bitexploder]

It is very hard to reason about lifetimes and they can eat you. We have a lot of guidelines and strategies to simplify it, but it still just isn’t amazing.