I've thought before about making a "dialect" of C++ that doesn't add any new fundamental capabilities, but simply changes syntax to make the more modern options easy and natural and make old C features verbose and difficult. For example, using "*" to represent unique_ptr and std::legacy_c_ptr<...> to represent "bare" pointers. Ideally, such a dialect could be fully include-compatible with all existing C++ code (although macros could be difficult), similar to how Rust "editions" or go "language versions" work. If C++ compilers offered a "#pragma modern_defaults" would people be interested in using it?