I use a fair amount of C++ for my code and its entirely because all the other tools I use - SAT solvers, model checkers, etc. are written in C++. I don't like i

I use a fair amount of C++ for my code and its entirely because all the other tools I use - SAT solvers, model checkers, etc. are written in C++. I don't like it very much and many others in my community don't like either, but we're all stuck in this local maximum. Moving to an entirely new language is impractical for any single project so all the new projects end up using C++ which in turn means the projects that come after them ending up using C++ as well. For a concrete example, look at something like ABC (https://bitbucket.org/alanmi/abc https://bitbucket.org/alanmi/abc). There is very little incentive to rewrite the whole thing in a safe language but if you're doing new circuit verification research having ABC's humongous library of transformations and verification algorithms will be a huge help in implementing new things. There have been a few attempts to break away though. Some folks at SRI wrote the model checker SAL in Ocaml, a lot of CMU folks seem to like Ocaml too: for example the bitblaze project uses Ocaml. And z3py has helped make Python popular. I've lost countless hours of my life debugging the sorts of issues this guy is talking about, so I really hope we do make the switch to something better.