Should C++ be deprecated?

Posted Sep 17, 2025 16:38 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Should C++ be deprecated? by smurf
Parent article: Comparing Rust to Carbon

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.