You must be talking about Linux, the BSDs, sqlite, postgres, gcc, the mold linker, or let's take some new kids on the block: raddebugger, FilePilot, TaskSlinger?
I am for example talking about LLVM and GCC, used to compile all those examples.
Living in the past? GCC has long adopted C++, last time it compiled with a pure C compiler was back in 2011 thereabouts, not cross-checking the exact year.
Actually care to open GCC and see what I mean? Check the newest commits and see what they do. Maybe you're living in a dream world where some magic language features do the work for you. Meanwhile people out in the field do actual work by just pushing bytes at the low level.
> Necessary to bootstrap GCC. GCC 5.4 or newer has sufficient support for used C++14 features.
> Versions of GCC prior to 15 allow bootstrapping with an ISO C++11 compiler, versions prior to 10.5 allow bootstrapping with an ISO C++98 compiler, and versions prior to 4.8 allow bootstrapping with an ISO C89 compiler.
> If you need to build an intermediate version of GCC in order to bootstrap current GCC, consider GCC 9.5: it can build the current D compiler, and was also the version that declared C++17 support stable.
Why are you unable to get my point? I understand that GCC doesn't compile with plain C compiler anymore. A lot of my own code doesn't!
I'm saying that most of features like templates, constexpr, reflection etc. don't scale well to serious use, as a broad statement. I fully acknowledge this is not a black and white situation. But I encourage you to look at actual pedestrian code, it's mostly not abstracted fluffy magic template code at all. It's pushing individual bytes with totally basic means (mostly C code). Why? Because code using these fluffy features is terribly hard to maintain. Templates lock you in their own language world with incredibly bad syntax and bad ergonomics, in short: it's a pain!
Personally I think even C++ classes (i.e. 1980's C++) are unusable because they bifurcate syntax/semantics needlessly and add implicit invisible scope. But I acknowledge it's somewhat possible to program with classes, and some people like to lean on RAII heavily. I mostly do not like to use RAII, and I've tried many times, I think it sucks for non-toy programming, even though obviously the idea is intuitive.