I consider modern C++ to be a lot safer than C. Between RAII, copy, and move schematics the pointer use has gone down quite a bit. When you do use pointers, we

I consider modern C++ to be a lot safer than C. Between RAII, copy, and move schematics the pointer use has gone down quite a bit. When you do use pointers, we finally have a real null pointer literal now. (I believe the latest C spec has also received this.) C++ is certainly crufty. The language has been around for a long time and many features in the specification exist to support legacy code. This is a side effect of being a living language with a huge user base. Modern C++ tends to be fairly clean and reasonably easy to work in. Herb Sutter has some great talks and blog articles around the topic. For example: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-661 http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/2-661