> When I look at C++14 and later I can't help but throw my hands up, Why C++14? The changes were very minor and mostly about being able to declare lambda funct

> When I look at C++14 and later I can't help but throw my hands up, Why C++14? The changes were very minor and mostly about being able to declare lambda functions with auto, which is extremely useful. > Waiting for Cross-Platform standardized SIMD vector datatypes I only know of ISPC having this, but there are also lots of SIMD libraries for C++ that are small and have minimal dependencies. > Using nonstandard extensions, libraries or home-baked solutions to run computations in parallel on many cores or on different processors than the CPU std::thread, atomics, and mutexes were added in C++11 and work extremely well. OpenMP is in the top four compilers if someone wants super easy fork-join parallelism. What other languages make C++ look archaic here? > Debugging cross-platform code using couts, cerrs and printfs Both visual studio and Qt Creator have made this unnecessary for a long time (if you can do step through debugging). What other language are you thinking of that makes C++ look archaic here? > Forced to use boost for even quite elementary operations on std::strings. That's completely ridiculous. It is easy to avoid boost these days (thank god). This is DEFINITELY not worth using boost for. First you can use https://github.com/imageworks/pystring https://github.com/imageworks/pystring on top of what C++ already has combined with regular expressions. I don't think anything you listed is actually a problem. If you had talked about not having a standard networking library or standard serialization it might have made more sense.