The Carbon Language is an experimental C++ successor. It is designed to bring the most large-scale and brownfield of C++ systems incrementally towards memory safety through seamless C++ interop and migration. This talk will show why we feel like a new language is needed here, despite the inherent costs it incurs. It will introduce the audience to the core of Carbon, including showing both how it improves on C++ but without creating fundamental impedance mismatches between the designs.

It will also dive into how we expect to apply memory safety on top of this platform. We will showcase how we are making significantly different tradeoffs in Carbon compared to Rust, and how those tradeoffs lead to a smoother transition when starting from memory unsafe C++ code and APIs. Finally, we will cover the concrete C++ interop story, and how existing C++ code and ecosystems are available in Carbon without friction or overhead.