Should C++ be deprecated? [LWN.net]

Should C++ be deprecated?

Posted Sep 17, 2025 12:41 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Should C++ be deprecated? by excors
Parent article: Comparing Rust to Carbon

But to deprecate C++ globally means getting most of the trusted experts worldwide to say that C++ is deprecated; I don't see a path through to that in the near future, because the people we'd need to deprecate C++ in any significant fashion are currently backing C++.

In the long run, things like the EU's Cyber Resilience Act are going to push in this sort of general direction, by stopping commercial entities from treating security as an externality, but that's a very slow process.

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Should C++ be deprecated?

Posted Sep 17, 2025 16:26 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

> to deprecate C++ globally means getting most of the trusted experts worldwide to say that C++ is deprecated

Not necessarily. If the government entity responsible for the standards organization that certifies your certified-and-thus-expensive access control system, esp. its compliance with regulations and whatnot, says "C++ is deprecated", this directly translates to requiring extra justification/scrutinity when you renew said certification, the number of C++ experts who say that C++ is fine nonwithstanding.

Should C++ be deprecated?

Posted Sep 17, 2025 16:38 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Most of the standards I'm aware of don't care about language in use - they won't ever deprecate C++ as a result. Instead, they have the notion of a "qualified compiler", and if your compiler is qualified and you meet the caveats of that qualification, then you can do your certification at source level, instead of binary level.

Ferrocene is an example of a qualified compiler; you'd use the Project Documents to determine whether you're meeting the qualification requirements for this compiler; in this case, there's a set of constraints in the Safety Manual which tell you what the caveats are for Ferrocene.

You might see the qualification caveats for your C++ compiler get gradually more stringent, which might have the effect of making you deprecate C++ (especially if they start to conflict with "custom and practice" in the wider C++ community), but that's the most certification is likely to lead to.