[petmon]

I think you DO have to know about those, or close analogs, in writing Rust. I like both C++ and Rust but I will rise to defend C++.

1. Exception safety becomes "catch_unwind." You might object that nobody cares about that, but major C++ codebases (Google, LLVM, Mozilla) don't care about exceptions; they are built with -fno-exceptions.

2. Move semantics in C++ are annoying, and so is the borrow checker. In Rust you get hit by things like "this code is fine here, but you aren't allowed to refactor it into a function" because there's no interprocedrural visibility into struct fields.

3. Meta-template higgery-jiggery is real and bad in C++, but has a mirror in Rust. With C++ duck-typed generics you write dumb code that does the thing, and then you can refine it with hilariously awful techniques like SFINAE. In Rust you're googling higher-ranked trait bounds before you can even write the thing. What does `for` do again? I think "strongly-typed language, duck-typed generics" is a bit of a sweet spot and C++ has lucked its way into it.

4. "30 years of cruft" means things like "I speak C preprocessor" which is practical. C compat is why C++ is both so awkward and so successful. There's no smooth ramp from C++ to Rust, the way there was from C to C++; that's a choice and maybe the right choice but it has a price.

[ncmncm]

"Hilariously awful" template metaprogramming is a thing of the past. It has been years since it seemed needed, or since I read any. New, more intuitive features have displaced it.

With concepts in C++20, you get to choose whether templates are duck-typed.