[metaltyphoon]

> Given that Rust is quite an old language now and its adoption is still so low,

So being part of 3 major OS (Windows, Android and now Linux), the big 3 cloud providers having SDKs for the language, used by so much tooling (js + python) and being part of major internet infrastructure means its “slow” adoption then wow…

[pron]

Very much so once you compare it to how quickly C++ (and, in fact, any language that's ever been in the top 5 or so) achieved similar milestones. Rust's adoption is very impressive when you compare it to, say, Haskell or Clojure, but not when you compare it to languages that achieved significant and long-lasting popularity. It's roughly similar to Ada's adoption when it was of a similar age (Ada was more prevalent then than Rust is now in some areas and less so in others). When work on Rust started twenty years ago, Java was younger than Rust is now. It was almost as close in time to the early work on C++ as we are now to the early work on Rust. Larger portions of operating systems were being written in C++ when it was younger than Rust is now.

There's no denying Rust's popularity in open-source CLI dev tools for Python and JS/TS, but when you talk to C/C++ shops who've evaluated Rust and see how many of them end up using it (and to what extent) you see it's not like it's been with languages that ended up achieving real popularity (which includes not only super-popular languages like C, C++, and Java, but also mid-popular languages like Go).

[pjmlp]

To this day C++ has hardly won the hearts of C devs on the embedded space, on both sides of the camp there are individuals that start religious discussions about the C/C++ abreviation, there is something like Orthodox C++ that basically means using C++ compiler to write what is mostly Better C, and most frameworks that were so hyped in the 1990's are now gone, or subsyst in maintenance contracts on applications that when the time gets to be rewritten it won't surely be C++.

So even though C++ is the language I reach for outside Java, C#, TypeScript, I would assert that downplaying Rust adoption by Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, is losing track where things are going.

[metaltyphoon]

> Very much so once you compare it to how quickly C++

C++ came out in 1985 and competed with C, COBOL, Pascal and FORTRAN. It was an overall improvement than those and therefore there is a legit reason for it to take off.

> how many of them end up using it (and to what extent) you see it's not like it's been with languages that ended up achieving real popularity

I assume many places that have a huge codebase in C++ would just do a port to Rust. That would almost always cause problems but for greenfield projects it's a no brainer IMO.

[kibwen]

> Very much so once you compare it to how quickly C++ (and, in fact, any language that's ever been in the top 5 or so) achieved similar milestones.

No, this completely overestimates how quickly languages gain prominence.

C came out in 1972 and didn't gain its current dominance until approximately the release of the ANSI C spec in 1989/1990, after 17 years.

C++ came out in 1985 and didn't become the dominant language for gamedev until the late 90s (after it had its business-language-logic niche completely eaten by Java), after 14 years or so.

Python came out in 1991 and labored as an obscure Perl alternative until the mid-late 2000s, after about 16 years (we can carbon-date the moment of its popularity by looking at when https://xkcd.com/353/ was released).

Javascript came out in 1995 and was treated as a joke and/or afterthought in the broader programming discourse until Node.js came out in 2009, after 14 years.

Rust is currently 11 years old, and it's doing quite excellently for its age.