I think the main appeal is subset lock-down and compile times. ~5000 lines in C gets me sub second iteration times, while ~5000 lines in C++ hits the 10 second mark. Including both iostream and format in C++ gets any project up into the ~1.5 second mark which kills my iteration interests.

Second to that I'd say the appeal is just watching something you've known for a long time grow slowly and steadily.

This, and the two pages of incomprehensible compiler spam you get when you make a typo in C++.

Depends pretty much on where you do such typo.

If you mean templates, a kind of solved problem since C++17 with static_assert and enable_if, moreso in C++20 with concepts.

Use binary libraries and modules, alongside incremental compilation and linking.

I can't really afford the link time optimization losses

It is called link time optimization for a reason.

Which kills my iteration interests ;)

I see it the other way round. People hurt themselves by using C++. C++ fans will never understand it, but it you can solve your problem in a much simpler way, this is far better.

We won't, because C++ is Typescript for C.

It offers us safety features for arrays and strings, that apparently WG14 will never add to C.

Didn't so in 40 years, and still remains to be seen what will be done with the current trend of cybersecurity laws.

Then there is the whole basic stuff like proper namespaces instead of the ridiculous prefix convention.

This from a point of view of C++ ARM defacto standard back in the 1990's, not even considering anything else.

I see more possibilities for people to hurt themselves using C than C++, since 1993 when I added C++ to my toolbox.

The stl is also unsafe by default and not actually safer than what you can also do in C.

I debugged enough problematic C++ code to know that people can hurt themselves badly with it.

Contrary to C standard library, all C++ compilers have provided safe versions of their standard libraries, predating C++98, enabled in debug mode.

Even if non standard, all major C++ compiler vendors have provided similar features on their standard library, and is now officially supported in C++26.

I have debugged enough C memory corruption issues with strings and arrays, that I would thought by now WG14 would actually care to fix the root cause, 40 years in.

The C standard library does not have containers, so I do not see how this sentence makes any sense. The reality is that C++ STL is in practice not really safer than C arrays, and although you can activate bounds checking, there remain many gotchas. But I am happy to see that bounds checking is now becoming official with C++26. For C arrays you get bounds checking in practice with -fsanitize=bounds. For containers, you would need a library in C that does bounds checking. So in both languages it is possible to get bounds checking if you want to.

A compiler extension only available in clang is not C, so nope, there is no solution available in ISO C, and apparently never will be one.

Also to note that said extension only exists because Apple did the work WG14 did not bothered to do for the last 40 years, and as way to improve interop with safe Swift.

The compiler extension is also available in GCC at least, and it was you who cited extensions.

Doesn't change the fact that isn't on ISO C.

At least WG21 eventually did the correct thing and placed those extensions into the standard, even if due to governmental pressure.

Also while enabling bounds checking has been a common configuration option in all C++ compilers, clang and GCC aren't all C compilers.

This kind of discussion is also quite telling that nothing will change on WG14, maybe eventually who knows, C2y might finally get fat pointers if voted in, and then we will see during the following decades whatever fruits that will bare.

That WG21 made finally made its containers safer is great, but the C standard library does not have containers. You can still have your own bounds checked containers just fine in C, as you could in the past.. ISO C simply does not matter as much as you like to pretend - for trolling I must assume.

When we will have a standard for bounds checking arrays and pointers remains to be seen, but this does not stop anyone from using the non-standard tools available today.

IMHO C++ scales far better for large, self-contained, personal projects though it requires slightly more initial investment.

And if you're targeting PC, you might be better off using Python to begin with (if perf is not a concern)

What specifically makes it scale better in your opinion?

- "All" C libraries use some form of namespacing (the typical mylib_dosomething kind of name); actual namespaces mean you don't write these prefixes over and over again when in the same namespace

- "Most" C projects do basic OOP, many C projects even do inheritance via composition and a fair few of these do virtual dispatch too

- Templates (esp. since C++20), lambda functions, overloads and more recently coroutines (which are fancy FSM in their impl), etc. reduce boilerplate a lot

- Containers (whether std:: or one's own) are far easier to work with in C++, a lot less boilerplate overall (GDB leveraged this during their migration iirc)

- string_view makes non-destructive substring manipulation a lot easier; chrono literals (in application code) make working with durations a lot more readable too

In the past decade or two, major projects like GCC and GDB have migrated from C to C++.

Obviously, C retains advantages over C++, but they are fairly limited: faster build times, not having to worry about exposing "extern C" interface in libraries, not having to worry about controversial features like exceptions and (contextually) magic statics and so on...

Nicely said!

One other key thing is encapsulation provided via various C++ syntax which is missing in C (where only file scope is possible).