> We've already been improving C++'s safety and ergonomics with every ISO C++ release, but they have been "10%" improvements. We haven't been able to do a "10x" improvement primarily because we have to keep 100% syntax backward compatibility.
You really don't. The vast majority of projects will never change the language version they use. Simple projects are simple to fix. Remaining large projects have enough resources and expertise to do changes across their entire code base - Chromium has recently changed more than 15000 instances (in over 8000 files) of using raw pointers to using raw_ptr instead in a single pull request [0]. How? They wrote a Clang based tool which did it automatically [1].
You really don't. The vast majority of projects will never change the language version they use. Simple projects are simple to fix. Remaining large projects have enough resources and expertise to do changes across their entire code base - Chromium has recently changed more than 15000 instances (in over 8000 files) of using raw pointers to using raw_ptr instead in a single pull request [0]. How? They wrote a Clang based tool which did it automatically [1].
[0] https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/33...
[1] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:too...