C++ is as much a tool for building nice systems DSLs as it is a systems language. The heavy investment in compile-time expressiveness has really paid off for the language over time.
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/main/stl/src/vector_al...
I tried it again with C++ out of curiosity and C++ is ridiculously featured for making it into your own and little domain languages or something that feels like a new feature. Genuinely kind of awesome for transpilers and it definitely gave some insight to the "C++ is awesome, but you have to pick the 20% of features you like" wisdom I've heard
LLMs were fun for exploring C++ patterns as well. I could ask it techniques for approximating some construct in another language and get a full page of toys to try out. It definitely made me want to explore templates in my own language in addition to runtime generics
Sometimes I want to think about algorithms and memory management separately.
scores = {"alice": 100, "bob": 85}
scores["charlie"] = 92
This is why we need natural language -> pseudo code -> GC typed -> Low level systems.
Both Zig and Rust are fine as the last stage of this software development pipeline with different trade-offs. Problems arise when people try to use them earlier in the process.
I have my own object system with constructor methods that all return a status code so you don’t need exceptions, my own stdlib for containers, buffered I/O, networking, hashing, math, threading, async, etc.
C++ gives you all the features to effectively build your own language, and you can use first class tooling since C++ is widely supported. LLMs also make it much easier to build out and test an entire stdlib on your own.