Just my 2 cents from personal experience. > a) Functionality (does it work, is it safe?), b) Readability c) Conciseness d) Performance and e) Extendibility I

Just my 2 cents from personal experience. > a) Functionality (does it work, is it safe?), b) Readability c) Conciseness d) Performance and e) Extendibility I use a lot of library features after C++11. Variant, span, and string_view are the most important ones. As to language features, structured bindings and variable templates come to mind. They pretty much hit all of your code quality points. I don't think these are for "a small circle of language academics" either (I'm definitely not in that "small circle"). Syntax-wise, meta programming can get ugly yes. Even Stroustrup himself doesn't like it. I guess at this point it's just for "historical reasons". > Using nonstandard extensions, libraries or home-baked solutions to run computations in parallel on many cores or on different processors than the CPU I think this one comes down to that there are a vast range of parallel computing models out there, and C++ wants to have generality. I used to write a lot of MPI programs targeting the super computers. I don’t think any language would want to include that in the standard… > Debugging cross-platform code using couts, cerrs and printfs What’s wrong with printing? I even debug JavaScript programs with console.log(). It’s convenient. If you just do local dev, debuggers work pretty well, you can debug however you want. I was unfortunate enough to have pretty much always worked on platforms that is hard to have a good remote debugging session, due to hardware capacity, legacy toolchain, or even ssh-ing onto the host being hard enough due to security. But that's hardly C++'s fault. > Forced to use boost for even quite elementary operations on std::strings It’d be great if std::string has more features. But I don’t think it a big deal. Personally I don’t like linking boost to my programs, so I just write my own libraries for that. It’s just elementary operations anyway.