C++ does work on its own and there are projects which don't or can't use the STL. That can still be very useful in specific contexts. Rust also works on its ow

C++ does work on its own and there are projects which don't or can't use the STL. That can still be very useful in specific contexts. Rust also works on its own as far as I'm aware (no_std), but I haven't used that. Furthermore, it makes a major difference whether the language is covered in 500 or 2000 pages, because the former is much easier to search through and understand. Not to mention that it's very rare for the average developer to even read the whole thing, as I mentioned. The realistic use case is to look into a few paragraphs of a specific chapter of the standard. The fact that the standard library is available or not in FreeBSD is not that relevant, because specific libraries can be trivially excluded by agreement, in code review, automatically in CI, etc. In conclusion, your claim about the standard was a theoretical exaggeration, which is based on my experience not an issue for C++ developers in practice. If you've had a different experience, please provide concrete examples. The GC is by the way not a good example: it's irrelevant for practicing C++ developers and just a historical curiosity and little gotcha to be included in online discussions. By and large, the ISO standard enabled C++ to survive for many decades. It's not clear that Rust will survive that long. Rust may be 10, but it's only seen (relatively) significant public use in the past one or two years. The real challenge is changing and evolving the language while it's in wide use, not while it's used by a small group of enthusiasts. So do let's talk again in 10-20 years ;-) Properly to put it very simply means that the programmer is able to write in a reasonable amount of time correct, idiomatic, maintainable code which satisfies its given requirements. If the community in fact agrees that smart pointers are the favoured approach, then not using them because one stopped learning C++ is non-idiomatic and barring exceptional circumstances not "proper". And actually this is one of my issues with Rust: idiomatic code is reference-heavy, meaning lifetime-heavy and it seems async is or is about to be idiomatic. The language is non-ergonomic. The same kind of language astronauts that are running the Rust show are present also in C++, conjuring template contraptions, but they can be mostly ignored and one can write simpler code.