To be fair, there's nothing wrong with only using the parts of C++ you want. If you avoid things like templates, exceptions, RTTI etc. then e.g. your compile times will not suffer like people always complain about, your error messages will not be cryptic, plus you'll have stronger typing, easier/safer lifetime management with ctor/dtors and easier to read code from class usage.

Personally I think Swift has great potential if it can get past the speed and cross-platform issues, as it was designed by (among others) some C++ committee folks, and so it feels a lot more familiar than say, Rust, plus it fixes a lot of long-standing issues.

There is also an Indian kernel fork that allows C++ drivers.