[shadowgovt]

The language specification is already larger than several classical tomes of fiction. A reader could choose to tuck in with the C++ spec, or with War and Peace.

And given how much of the language's spec is "The behavior is undefined when combining these two features," it's not really a tome that is safely ignored.

At this point, I cannot recommend C++ on any new project that some external factor such as safety certification (which "solves" the problem by adding yet more pages of stuff a developer must not do that the language syntactically supports and compiles but generates garbage output) isn't forcing my hand on.

As of 2026 C has eclipsed C++ in popularity on the TIOBE index; anecdotally, roboticists I've chatted with have told me they prefer to write core functionality as C modules and then weld them together into high-level behavior with a terser scripting DSL over trying to write the whole thing in C++ and hoping there's no undefined behavior hidden in the cracks that multiple layers of linters, sanitizers, and auto-certifiers have missed.