Google software developer Chandler Caruth presented the Carbon Language, characterised as a "experimental successor to C++".
The C++ North conference in Toronto this week, piqued the C++ community's attention.
"We recognise the community's interest in this keynote. "We will upload the footage as soon as possible," declared the conference organisers on Twitter.
Carruth is Google's technical lead for core programming languages and language development, serves on the C++ Standards Committee, and contributes to LLVM and Clang.
While C++ is the "dominant language for performance-critical applications," the Carbon authors note that its heritage and technical debt make "incrementally enhancing C++ exceedingly difficult."
One alternative is to move to other languages such as Rust, Kotlin, Swift, or Go, although these languages are difficult to learn and have performance cost in some circumstances.
Carbon is a new language that attempts to equal C++'s speed while maintaining "seamless bidirectional compatibility" and a mild learning curve for C++ developers.
In addition, the team promises "some level of source to source translation" for C++ code.
The project is similar to TypeScript for JavaScript developers and Kotlin for Java developers, albeit the similarities are not perfect.
Carbon is intended to be compatible with C++ programmes and to facilitate migration. The Carbon toolchain will be able to compile C++ code.