Rust is nowhere near C++’s complexity.

And most of C++’s language complexity doesn’t come from “large scale industry deployment”, it comes from implementing a feature in a half-assed way, then updating it, but then the old feature needs to be kept around so all the libraries need to deal with two ways of doing things. Then something new and better comes along, and it needs to deal with three ways of doing things.

Meanwhile, developers get frustrated with how difficult the abstractions are to use, and end up carving out their own codebase-specific coding standards.

On Rust’s side, there’s 10x the emphasis on making things easy to use, so developers converge to consensus on pretty much the same modern style.

Just look at project management. Before I even write a project, with C++ I’m hit with choosing between a barrage of build systems and package managers, none of them particularly good. Will I use cmake and Conan? Then I’m stuck writing several lines of boilerplate before I even get started in a weird non-imperative language.

In Rust, I type cargo init and I’m ready to go.

C++ has basically completely fallen down when it comes to language design, and from what I’ve seen, is simultaneously in denial that things are so horrible for its end users (Bjarne Stroustrup iirc putting out an essay where he claimed “C++ is fine for any project I’m concerned about”) and suddenly trying to rush to (badly) copy features from Rust, and only recently coming to the realization that it really needs to abandon some of its fundamental precepts to stop self-sabotaging by carrying around massive amounts of baggage that nobody should be using anymore.

Meanwhile even the White House and other government agencies are saying “please use anything but C or C++”. Because ultimately, no one writes anything close to modern C++, and even modern C++’s memory safety guarantees are painfully minimal in exchange for massive amounts of code complexity (you still have to track every pointer lifetime yourself, and every safety abstraction is opt-in, so you still have to have the expertise to not cut yourself, and every codebase is unique and different in its conventions, which precludes running any kind of static analysis that could rival Rust without significant time investment).

It’s just..really bad. The only way Rust will get there is if it falls prey to the same feature hoarding as C++

But Rust already has a deprecation-and-removal process for features, as well as an edition system to provide backwards compatibility for old code, and standardized tooling for linting that’s 10x better at telling you how to refactor than anything I’ve seen with C++.

And god help you if you have an error in your code, because the C++ compiler will probably dump you out with a dozen irrelevant errors of dense template code you need to skip over, while with Rust you’ll make a mistake with lifetimes that will generate a text visualization of what you did wrong with the compiler pointing to what you need to change. Plus the Rust program will probably just run the first or second try, whereas the C++ program will segfault for the next ten minutes or so, because all the strictness in Rust means the complexity is more meaningful and less performative.

Look at what people are learning in schools today and I bet they’re still starting with new and delete or even malloc and free rather than things like std::make_unique and std::span.

The whole C++ ecosystem is basically predicated on nearly everyone having incomplete knowledge and doing something different and having to support or account for infinite combinations of features, whereas Rust has a higher barrier to entry but you can presume that pretty much everybody is using an idiomatic set of constructs for a given edition.

Anyway, sorry for beating that over your head. I started with C++ around the time of Visual C++ 6, and to me it’s absolutely shameful at how bad the language has gotten. Whole ecosystems (C#, Java) and subsequent ecosystems (Go, Rust) have arisen in response to how bad people have it programming in C++, and despite two decades of people running away from C++ to create their own general-purpose programming language, so many proponents of the language seem to still be in denial. They’ve simply shifted the goalposts from C++ being the general-purpose programming language to it being a “systems” language to rationalize why the vast majority of developers don’t use it anymore because it refused to evolve.

I see people these days comparing it to COBOL, that is, it’s not that anyone wants to use it for the merits of its language design, it simply has incumbency status that means it will be around for a long time.