As a work-a-day hacker it’s completely become my go to language when I’m writing tools, libraries or just want to knock out a simple algorithm to prove myself right or wrong.
See... I don't think that's true, and argue the huge body of C++ code and talent in the ecosystem is an existence proof to the contrary.
I mean, sure, C++ has its crazy edge cases and its odd notions. But you don't need to understand the vagaries of undefined behavior, or the RVO, or move semantics to write and deploy perfectly sensible code. Literally hundreds of thousands of people are doing this every day.
Now, that may not be a convincing argument about the value of that code. But it's absolutely an argument about the utility of the language in aggregate.
I'll be frank: probably 40% of professional C++ programmers aren't going to be able to pick up Rust and be productive in it, at all. And at the end of the day a language for The Elite isn't really going to mean much. We've had plenty of those. Rust is the new APL, like I said.
Just off the top of my head, std::move doesn't... move [1]. It just returns an, I kid you not "static_cast<typename remove_reference<T>::type&&>(t)" without doing... anything. You can keep on using the old value probably, silently, until out of the blue, it stops working one day. Then you're super, duper sad. Even modern language features are, I don't want to say lies, but "hopes and dreams" the compiler can't enforce. It's like if you really wished C++ had Rust's features, but you can't without breaking things, so you give it your best shot, which ends up just creating yet more complexity.
Rust's answer is...
let x = Value::new();
let y = x;
let z = x; (COMPILER ERROR: X GOT MOVED INTO Y)
It takes a lot of gymnastics to call this language approachable or understandable. It's basically a coal powered car made of foot-guns. That doesn't mean it's not a car, or that it won't get you where you're trying to go, I'm just saying it's an open question how many pieces you'll arrive in.
[1] http://yacoder.guru/blog/2015/03/14/cpp-curiosities-std-move...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/09/20/161466361...
I mean that makes sense in a (somewhat nonsensical) way, std::move is a marker for "you can move this thing if you want".
The much weirder part is that even if a value is moved it's not moved, it's carved out, you get to keep a shell value in a "valid but unspecified state". Reusing that value (which the compiler won't prevent) may or may not be UB depending on the exact nature of the operation and state.
Oh and of course that a change / override to the caller and recompile can change the behaviour of the callsite entirely (e.g. a previously moved value is not moved anymore, or the other way around) but that's pretty common for C++.
Don't you kind of have to though? These invariants are in your code no matter what, in the case of Rust they are checked by the compiler (you don't necessarily have to understand every nuance, because it's checked for you), in C++ they aren't checked and are a potential bomb waiting to go off.
> Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
The language is entirely about inclusion, empowerment, and removing the fear of systems development.
I know you're trying to compare it to APL as that language mostly died off and is thus obscure, but I think the analogy is a little off.
While APL is weird, it is actually really easy for me (someone with less than 15 hours playing with the language in total over the past few years) to code up some basic scripts a lot easier than something like C++.
I'm being absolutely serious too. C++ is pretty low level and as a Python coder I feel like I'm sinking in quicksand with everything required to do something simple. APL is basically built around passing arrays of numbers or strings to weird symbols that operate on the whole array. This means I can do text processing with only a few symbols and a library function (and all interactively) where C++ requires lots of boilerplate and debuggers and compilation and pointers. In short, APL seems to be a lot less complicated than both Rust and C++ in my opinion and most using it have very little formal programming experience and have no problem picking it up from what I've read.
I know what you were essentially trying to say though.
And yes, Fortran, APL, Ada (also Modula-2 & Oberon, Smalltalk and a bunch of other forgotten languages presented as the Next Big Thing at the time) are all uniformly simpler than either C++ or Rust. The modern world is a more complicated place and programming tools have kept up.
Looks to me more like proof that C++ has been around a long time
But it doesn't mean that we can't do it better these days.
Well, a certain number of professional programmers are past the point of being willing to learn new technologies, so maybe that's true. But close to 100% of the people who might become professional C++ programmers could instead become professional Rust programmers.