Safe C++ proposal is not being continued

29 charles_irl 6 9/13/2025, 7:00:29 PM sibellavia.lol ↗

Comments (6)

LorenDB · 32m ago
The title has potential to be a bit misleading, because as the article says, while Sean Baxter's proposal is not being continued, the committee is working on the Profiles proposal, which still will enable some level of safety. So C++ is still working towards safety, just not the Safe C++ safety.
loeg · 16m ago
Seems clear enough to me. The "Safe C++" proposal is not being continued. Profiles is not what was proposed in "Safe C++."
coffeeaddict1 · 29m ago
The safety story with Profiles is rather basic (almost laughable honestly) and hardly any improvement over what was already achievable with compiler flags and clang-tidy.
TimorousBestie · 18m ago
C++ is working towards safety with the same enthusiasm with which I tackle AI-generated merge requests.
strus · 27m ago
I don’t think anyone is surprised.
quotemstr · 19m ago
Okay, so treat the C++ standards committee the same way the HTML5 people treated W3C. If they insist on making themselves irrelevant, let them.

Profiles cannot achieve the same level of safety as Rust and it's obvious to anyone who breathes. Profiles just delete stuff from the language. Without lifetimes reified as types you can't express semantics with precision enough to check them. The moment string_view appears, you're horked.

Okay, so you ban all uncounted reference types too. Now what you're left with isn't shit Rust but instead shit Swift, one that combines the performance of a turtle with the ergonomics of a porcupine.

There's no value in making things a little bit safer here and there. The purpose of a type system is to embed proofs about invariants. If your system doesn't actually prove the the invariant, you can't rely on it and you've made is a shitty linter.

Continue the safe C++ work outside the context of the C++ standards committee. Its members, if you ignore their words and focus on the behaviors, would rather see the language become irrelevant than change decades old practices. Typical iron law of bureaucracy territory.