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> Adopt language epochs so that the language syntax and semantics can be evolved without having to fight backwards compatibility.
That's what Javascript got surprisingly right IMO: you can target the latest bleeding edge features, and still be able to compile and run them on 20-year-old browsers through code re-writing (aka transpilation) and polyfills [1]
I often wish this was available for other languages, too.
[1] Well, not all features because some if them are notoriously hard to polyfill (IIRC Proxies are one such unpolyfillable feature). And there's the huge issue of the entire world relying on just one guy: https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/blob/master/docs/2023-02...
They had something like this. It was called Core Guidelines. Which was a bit of a misnomer b/c it wasn't some glorified style guide but a set of tools and helpers/wrappers that effectively made it impossible to write a lot of unsafe pre-modern C++. For whatever reason this never really caught hold
It looks like its still being worked on though: https://isocpp.github.io/CppCoreGuidelines/CppCoreGuidelines
If you ask me, the GSL [1] alone is a fairly radical departure from C++ that delivers a lot of safety. I don't know if it's gotten much popularity, though. Probably because it introduces a similar disruption like you might find from a brand new programming language.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/GSL
Herb Sutter is working on a standalone, second syntax for C++ called "Cpp2" [1] to "reduce complexity 10x, increase safety 50x, improve toolability 10x, evolve more freely for another 30 years". [2]
Compiler Explorer lists it under Cpp2-cppfront. [3]
[1] https://herbsutter.com/2022/12/31/cpp2-and-cppfront-year-end...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELeZAKCN4tY&t=321s
[3] https://godbolt.org/
But isn't such a language already there? It's called the D Programming Language [1]. Sorry a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I'm getting tired of all these 'even-more-awesome' new programming language variants of C++.
[1] https://dlang.org/