I'm not sure that's true. Giving C++ 30 years has resulted in the things identified in the article. (In particular, giving auto_ptr 20+ years hasn't resulted in anything that really fixes the problem.) It is not clear to me that it's moving in the right direction, so I don't think more time will help. C++ is definitely ahead in popularity but is neither ahead not obviously aimed in the right direction in safety.

Giving Rust about ten years has resulted in significant growth in popularity and tooling, including attempts to write new implementations of the language (e.g., mrustc), so given more time and in particular given more production users, it seems reasonable to expect it will figure all those things out.

I don't think that C++'s memory safety issues can be solved by giving it more time.

> For example Intel's C++ compiler produces (or used to produce?) much more efficient numerical code than either gcc or clang.

I'm not an expert, but I believe that Intel could have implemented their hardware-specific optimizations in any other compiler framework (either gcc or clang). In this case multiple language implementations, while commercially viable, are not beneficial to all users.

It's a bona fide C++ killer for applications that are both security and performance critical. It's already gaining traction for those applications even within relatively conservative engineering organisations.

That said, there are many performance-critical applications who are not security-critical, and in those I'd expect C/C++ to persist pretty much indefinitely. And many security-critical applications which are not performance-critical, and can perfectly well be served by garbage collected languages like Java/C#/Go.

C++ has a huge learning curve too though, the difference is it lets you write whatever you want. The learning curve is to write correct C++. It’s deceptive, it’s like skiing vs snowboarding. Skiing you pick up fast but to get good is damn hard and few bother. Snowboarding is damn hard to pick up but then it’s pretty easy to become really good.

> Rust's learning curve isn't exactly a shallow one either.

I don't know how people can be so sure of this. We know essentially nothing about how to teach or learn Rust effectively, it's something that the community is just starting to look at. However, one thing we do know is that the detailed support that the Rust compiler provides to the novice programmer is quite simply unparalleled in other mainstream languages. It's basically the ultimate T.A.