There is the similarity that the editions don't really matter for ABI, but otherwise editions are substantially different from the std switch.

C/C++ std switches freeze the entire language and disable newer features. Editions don't. Rust 2015 edition isn't an old version of Rust. It's the latest version of Rust, except it allows `async` as an identifier.

Editions don't really have an equivalent in C, but they're closer to being like trigraphs than the std compilation switch.

That only works because the Editions get updated after being released.

The same can happen to ISO C and C++, that is what technical revision documents are for.

> Therefore, the answer to the question of, say, “what is a valid C++14 program?” changes over time, up until the publication of C++17, and so forth. In practice, the situation is a bit more complicated when compiler vendors offer conformance modes for specific language revisions (e.g. -std=c++11, -std=c++17). Vendors may consider defect resolutions to apply to any historic revision that contains the defect (whereas ISO considers only the most recent publication as the Standard).

http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p213...

In both cases, it is expected that compilers update their understanding what a specific language revision means.