I'm guessing once Zig is at 1.x (breaking changes before then), "real contenders" for C++ engines might shape up to on-par within the first few years of that po

I'm guessing once Zig is at 1.x (breaking changes before then), "real contenders" for C++ engines might shape up to on-par within the first few years of that point. (I mean the subset of such projects without prior or subsequent abandonment.) > I would even prefer C to C++ Assuming you want to game-dev not engine-dev, the above is quite the doable rule for your "C++" codebase under your own oversight and maintenance even though including some C++ engine and calling its APIs, right? (Apart from the fact that some-not-all of them expose some capi `.h`s from what I've seen.) Most of them might (assuming here I know) anyway tend toward the lean-and-mean none-too-OOP way of doing things, data-oriented designs etc. My (newbie) C++ is C (structs + funcs) but with struct methods and occasional light inheritance, aka Go-like (methods and embeds). The std::string too seems alright-enough right now (vs. a hand-rolled slice-of-T-being-uint8_t struct-making macro) as long as there's no mass string handlings going on, in which case it'll have to be evaluated more seriously.