> What is the point of C++ in 2025 except to maintain a large, existing source code base?
Half of useful things to do are impossible or plain cumbersome to write in rust given the semantics and constraints of the borrow checker. Try to write self referential structures in rust and you'll have a more nuanced opinion.
That’s entirely the point, though. Rust compiler is of the opinion that recursive data types are hard and I don’t think it can be reasonably argued that this opinion is incorrect.
Feel free to use unsafe {} when you need it, though.
I’ve written self-referential structures in Rust with the ouroboros and self_cell crates. It was fine, and I got way more guarantees I got it right compared to C++.
Half of useful things to do are impossible or plain cumbersome to write in rust given the semantics and constraints of the borrow checker. Try to write self referential structures in rust and you'll have a more nuanced opinion.