A large chunk of his argument doesn't hold at all. This: "At the moment, it's impossible for me to write portable code that I believe would work on lots of dif

A large chunk of his argument doesn't hold at all. This: "At the moment, it's impossible for me to write portable code that I believe would work on lots of different systems, unless I avoid all exotic features." Is just not remotely true anymore. Modern toolchains entirely obsoleted that. Modern C++ compilers are nothing like what Knuth used in 1993. If anything it's easier to write portable C++ than it is portable C due to C++'s STL increasingly covering much of the POSIX space these days.