There are lot of "roads not taken" that would have been better than what C++ actually did. Clearly Bjarne could have implemented his own linker-- if Go, Rust,

There are lot of "roads not taken" that would have been better than what C++ actually did. Clearly Bjarne could have implemented his own linker-- if Go, Rust, Objective C, etc. etc. can do it in a year or two, then Bjarne could have-- he's a big boy, after all. Even without rewriting the linker, you could create an informal module system the same way the linux kernel does-- by having well-defined and cleanly separated interfaces between modules which got linked into .a (library archive) files. Of course C++ failed to do this, either at the (nonexistent) module level, or even at the library level. C++ ABIs are a complete mess even to this very day-- it is effectively impossible for anyone but hardcore C++ gurus to know what changes to a class will break library compatibility. The best solution is to wrap your C++ API in a C API. Because C was a better thought-out and designed language, and can support stable APIs, whereas C++ can't.