> [...] This is the irony of C++. While there is a very nice subset of the language, that does nearly all the same things Rust does. You still have 30 years of legacy laying around. You likely won't find a job that EXCLUSIVELY follows the C++14 guidelines. You WILL have to learn the legacy patterns, and work with legacy code, and make legacy mistakes.

Large existing codebases are a strength of C++ though. Any new replacement language won't magically make those codebases go away.

> [...] But legacy C code never stood in the way of C++'s adoption. There are always gonna be MORE programmers tomorrow, then today. People adopting a language is hardly a zero sum game.

The killer feature of C++ was the seamless interoperability with C which allowed trivial use of C libraries, and, most importantly, easy piecemeal evolution of large C codebases.

For example GCC is begin ported to C++ with relative ease, while a rewrite in rust would be a significantly more complex endeavor.

Then again, beyond lifetime checking, rust and C++ are very similar languages and seamless interoperability is not inconceivable. I believe that's the missing feature for rust to achieve world domination.