I guess it depends on what kind of tools you see yourself building with a compiled systems language. I feel like I'd prefer Rust, due to being simpler and more

I guess it depends on what kind of tools you see yourself building with a compiled systems language. I feel like I'd prefer Rust, due to being simpler and more straightforward. It doesn't have decades of history, so there's less of a situation of having a bunch of legacy ways to do things with various footguns. Cargo makes it easy to pull in crates and build things with them. Some of it's parts, like Serde, are really slick. Others, like async support, are still a little tricky. On the other hand, there's no denying that C++ has a massive library of integrations with all sorts of things, and supports way more hardware, due to it's immensely long history. It's the preferred way to interact with most of the native GUI libraries out there. There's a zillion libraries you can connect to your C++ code. It's probably a little more complex than the best Rust integrations, but better a well-tested natively supported integration than trying to build a new Rust integration around it, or rely on a half-finished open-source project that nobody cares enough about to support. If any of those C++ reasons sound like something important to you or that you might want to work with in the future, then go with C++.