gcpp VS graph_ptr

static reflection and pattern-matching, as everyone is saying, but I'd also like to see a garbage-collecting smart-pointer in the standard library similar in design to Herb Sutter's deferred_ptr

There are definitely fringe edge cases where C++ can do things that Rust simply cannot, currently.

I'm thinking of things like Herb Sutter's deferred_heap (https://github.com/hsutter/gcpp) that give you GC-like abstraction. It's pretty cool that this is possible to write in vanilla C++ with decent ergonomics. I tried to make something similar awhile back and hit a wall in terms of making something that would be pleasant to use.

Rust has several on-going experiments with making a nice GC, along with good support for arenas. (If you can use arenas, they're great.)

Check out this library: https://github.com/hsutter/gcpp

Hm, yeah, that's pretty unclear. My understanding is based off the link to Herb's proposal in the OP, which I understand this to be an evolution of.

Re garbage collection: My understanding was that the standard API was intended for interop with managed languages, not for pure C++ code to use, although I could be mistaken. I don't think garbage collection is entirely a lost cause, for instance Herb Sutter's work, which I think he wants to integrate in Cppfront, would be a great way to do it. Imo, his garbage collection ([1] [2]) could be much better than D or Nim, because it has easily controllable performance characteristics. You don't pay for it if you won't use it, and it's unlikely that libraries you pull in would need it, which is imo what makes programming without the "optional" GC in D and Nim difficult.

Herb Sutter

Something like gcpp would be quite nice. That and a intelligent scope detector could make use of isolated and local GC when it detects that some objects stays together and have similar lifetime.

Herb Sutter has an experimental implementation of a smart pointer like this called deferred_ptr. I have another implementation of something similar called graph_ptr, that I made for a toy functional language I was working on (because Herb Sutter's reference implementation of deferred_ptr was too slow for my purposes). I think my smart pointer's general design etc. is better than that specific implementation though, just because I am not an expert at this sort of thing.