Why I Still Write C++ in 2026
Everyone keeps telling me to switch to Rust. Here's my honest take after another year in the trenches.
Every few months someone asks why I haven't fully moved to Rust. It's a fair question — the tooling has gotten genuinely good, and the safety guarantees are real.
Here's my honest answer: for the kind of latency-obsessed systems work I do, C++'s cost model is one I've internalized over a decade. I know exactly what a std::vector push_back costs me. I know when the compiler will and won't inline something. That intuition is worth a lot when you're chasing nanoseconds.
That said, I'm not precious about it. I reach for Rust when I'm writing something concurrent from scratch and want the compiler to catch data races I might miss. Different tools, different jobs.
More on the actual architecture decisions in a follow-up post.