On "Safe" C++

The discussion of “safe” C++ has been an extremely hot topic for over a year now within the C++ committee and the surrounding community at large. This was mostly brought about as a result of article, after article, after article coming out from various consumer advocacy groups, corporations, and governments showing time and again that C++ and its lack of memory safety is causing an absolute fuckload of problems for people.

And unfortunately, this means that WG21, the C++ committee, has to take action because people are demanding it. Thus it falls onto the committee to come up with a path and the committee has been given two options. Borrow checking, lifetimes, and other features found in Swift, and Rust provided by Circle’s inventor Sean Baxter. Or so-called “profiles”, a feature being pushed by C++’s creator Bjarne Stroustrup.

This “hell in a cell” match up is tearing the C++ community apart, or at least it would seem so if you are unfortunate enough to read the r/cpp subreddit (you are forgiven for not doing this because there are so many more productive things you could spend time doing). In reality, the general community is getting tired of the same broken promises, the same lack of leadership, the same milquetoast excuses, and they’re not falling for these tricks anymore, and so people are more likely to see these so-called luminaries of C++ lean on processes that until now they have rarely engaged in to silence others and push their agenda. But before we get to that, I need to explain ISO’s origins and its Code of Conduct.