I'd written C++ a bunch around 2006-2011 for gamedev, and jumped back into it recently and am really really loving it. I had a while in between of leaning into C which I think is important to do, to move away from the super OO based approach which I think C++ isn't necessarily about anymore.

Highlights for me:

- Type deduction -- basically using auto for variable declarations.

- Move semantics makes RAII actually usable since you can make heavy / important objects but then move them elsewhere and still have their lifetime be automatically managed. I use this in my game engine to wrap physics bodies etc. so that they are automatically removed from the scene when the component containing them is dropped (I'm using an ECS). A neat thing also is you can delete copy constructors and force certain types to be "move-only."

- Having been in C-land for a bit, I'm appreciating the ready availability of std::vector and std::string again. Also std::array is awesome.

- Lambdas are amazing. I often make simple control structure utilities in my modules that accept lambdas, and they are often inlined. I don't often do lambdas where I 'save them and call them later' -- they are mostly immediately called. This makes it safe to use reference captures.

As for C++20 I am mostly interested in seeing how it goes with modules Also the `requires` keyword will simplify some of my uses of `enable_if`.

A lot of the good stuff is also due to ecosystem and tooling vs. just language. My game works everywhere now: native macOS, Windows and iOS, but especially web due to Wasm! It also has an immediate
mode API for rendering UI in Wasm, which I use along with some simple reflection to get an automatic entity inspector: https://m.imgur.com/dyUtL8f The entire gameplay code fits in like 700 lines: https://gist.github.com/nikki93/5893543a5e3d76a7858d54b74a4c... You can see how I don't do any pointer stuff or manual recource / memory management there at all.

Tbh in many cases with precompiled headers it almost feels like it builds about as fast as webpack. And then my "publish" is a simple rsync of static files to the server.

Another tooling / ecosystem thing lately has been godbolt.org which is wonderful for seeing immediately the asm that ur code generates. Which then makes you realize how good optimizing compilers for C++ are these days. I don't think other languages have come so far. And then with godbolt.org you can learn which constructs produce what code.

I'm using entt for the ECS: https://github.com/skypjack/entt you can see how it encourages the use of POD structs and non-OO code for the most part. It feels good to use C++ in that style as a C with the above features. I just basically don't use vtables / RTTI anymore. I do use templates a fair amount.

I do concede that this enthusiasm may have a lot to do with having had experience in C/C++ already for a while. If I was completely new to the language it'd be a lot harder. The backwards compatibility lets me keep all my experience (even if the point isn't to write exactly like how I wrote before, but to understand the motivation for the new features). I've also dug into Go, Rust, Nim, Common Lisp, Haskell, ... but weirdly modern C++ has been the best combination of ergonomics, control, and portability. Especially for Wasm you really just want deterministic resource management. I'd probably still combine it with Lua or JS for scripting eventually.

You do have to invest a lot of energy into learning the language and caring about the details, but I think C++ is very well positioned to reward you for that investment, and you are also rewarded continuously and early.