I'd say both Rust and C++ trade blows when it comes to expressiveness. You know Rust already, so I'm not going to try sell you how powerful macros can be (see S

I'd say both Rust and C++ trade blows when it comes to expressiveness. You know Rust already, so I'm not going to try sell you how powerful macros can be (see SQLx's ability to compile-time check SQL queries). And indeed C++ templates are a lot more like Rust macros than Rust generics: They're turing-complete. Joint with some interesting language choices like SFINAE (substitution failure is not an error), you end up with the ability to specialize functions, methods and whole classes in C++. You can also have functions that return different types. C++ templates work like duck-typing within a static language: In Rust you need to say what traits your generics need to support. In C++ it will try and substitute and if it fails (say, because T doesn't support the required methods) it will try another substitution until none are left. If none of the substitutions work, you will be shown ALL of them in error reporting: This is what leads to pages and pages of compile errors of single-character typos in C++. Templates are really cool, but also pretty confusing when reading code since you're in a guessing game of what types will fit the constraints imposed by the _implementation_ of the function. From C++20 there's concepts to make templates work a little smoother. There's been whole books written about how to abuse templates: these are pre-requisite knowledge when working in large codebases.