Every project must colonize a valley of the language, declare a dialect, and bit-fiddle their own thing.
It might be a measure of popularity, but not of unity.
C++ sucks, but I'll take it over Rust any day.
I like C++ because I like the fairly unique high performance low level feature set, not because I particularly like most of the detailed design decisions that went into it. Rust has the same goals, but is better thought out IMO. I'm sure that I will find some more trouble in Rust as I use it more, but so far the impression is quite good. I have become pretty good at writing C++ code that works after fixing one or two stupid bugs, and that works even better in Rust, mostly without the stupid bugs because you can't forget to null-check a pointer to another subsystem while starting up etc.
My description of the red herring that is Rust stands as written.
I also wasn't a fan of Python or Javascript back in the day, for very sound reasons that your type will always just brush away as meaningless, yet in time these languages have proven to be just as flawed as I always knew they were. And yes, C++ is garbage too, as I've also understood, but you don't want to hear me when I tell you Rust is NOT any kind of solution.
In fact it's a great big joke that is obvious with the least bit of actual analysis. Question: Rust is built on top of LLVM, which is written in which language? ___. Fill in the blank. Hint: it's the language that is supposedly going to be replaced by Rust. lol.
Rust, the language that is so obviously great the only way to put it everywhere is to force it on people; force it into the kernel against big objections from smart engineers, force it into the browser with the power of Google, force it into the heart of Mesa through writing a critical component in it, etc.
Sort of like systemd, right? So obviously great that people have to be forced to use it, until the old guard has died off or been silenced and all that's left is the brainwashed youth who never knew anything different. Same old tactics the liars and crooks always used to force their garbage down on people and make them think it was their own idea.
Always the herd marches in the direction its owners desire, while each individual creature thinks "his" ideas are truly his own and he himself decided which direction he is to travel in.
I've long had the experience of people "suddenly beginning to discover" things I clearly understood on day one, decades ago. I've also long had the experience of never being given any credit for my actual understanding, instead constantly being told I'm wrong, stupid, have no idea what I'm talking about, blah blah. This is exactly why I don't spend much time hanging out with the hoi polloi anymore. (You Are Here.)
Javascript is even more dramatic, where it will tell you to fix every single variable declaration, as people decided "var" was a mistake, and there is a whole new way of defining classes.
Neither of which are great measures probably. What about usefulness?
Lambdas are nice to have, just don’t nest them more than once.
I kinda wish things like std::variant had shorter syntax.
if anything i’m not a fan of c++ introducing language features as long verbose functions than to confidently make it an operator or a keyword.
I take a very different view about the trajectory of languages given the current trends in software development. The more people rely upon agentic coding processes, the more they will demand faster compilation which will increasingly become a significant bottleneck on product velocity. The faster the llms get, the more important it is for the tools they use to be fast. Right now, I still think we are in an uncanny valley where llms are still slow enough that slow tooling does not seem that bad, but this is likely to change. People will no longer be satisfied asking their agent to make a change and come back in a minute or an hour. They will expect the result nearly instantaneously. C++ (and rust) compile times are too slow for the agent to iterate in the human reaction window so I believe that one of two things will happen over the next few years: llm progress will stall out or c++ and rust will nosedive in popularity.
However it would be imperative for a push such as Carbon[1] to be similar to the kotlin to Java. A modernisation that simplifies , maintains backwards/forwards compatibility and reuses established libraries and tooling.
This however will need a entity that can champion and push it forward with a strong enough project to anchor it in the mainstream.The transitions are doable ,like Android dev from plain java to kotlin , or in OSX moving from Objective-C to Swift.
Additionally borrowing a robust batteries type standard library to reduce the sprawl of coding options and funnel greenfield projects into best practices and less boilerplate.
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2337225/beyond-c-the-promi...
I lack a degree though
- The current CPP version is extremely bloated
- CPP is not going away anytime soon
- The rise of Rust/Go/Zig is not fighting for CPP's seat
- You can target CPP code using any of these aforementioned languages
- Rust has never claimed to be "safer", it just makes it harder to write unsafe code
Until current computers cycle out, people will largely keep their 1-3 year old machine with sane amounts of memory. If we start seeing large numbers of machines in the wild with 4GB of memory, then maybe software will adapt. But that won't be for several years yet.
Projecting into the future, hardware expenses have always been dwarfed by salaries. I don't expect that will change enough for it to be noticeable.