Pretty debatable. C++ was always a pretty big language. Maintaining a decades-old project is going to require either ongoing modernization or you’ll most likely end up touching a lot of it, but you can, and the “start over” option proposed so frequently around here is not for organizations with tens of thousands of engineer years in their codebase.
New stuff that doesn’t need your decade-plus of C++ libraries or hit a few other corner cases should probably be in Rust, but you’re back to, that’s mostly greenfield stuff.
If you are beholden to not starting from scratch, modern C++ heavily subsets the language and is rather pleasant, certainly the tooling is best-in-class (which is often overlooked).
I consider it a good thing that C++ still compiles code from decades ago, and it’s frankly astonishing how well it’s aged when you consider the domains it targets.
Ditching everything every few years is nice work if you can get it, and this being HN that’s going to be a vocal bloc, but usually you get to greenfield everything because something else failed.
New stuff that doesn’t need your decade-plus of C++ libraries or hit a few other corner cases should probably be in Rust, but you’re back to, that’s mostly greenfield stuff.
If you are beholden to not starting from scratch, modern C++ heavily subsets the language and is rather pleasant, certainly the tooling is best-in-class (which is often overlooked).
I consider it a good thing that C++ still compiles code from decades ago, and it’s frankly astonishing how well it’s aged when you consider the domains it targets.
Ditching everything every few years is nice work if you can get it, and this being HN that’s going to be a vocal bloc, but usually you get to greenfield everything because something else failed.