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pron | 14 days ago

> So you agree by your own criteria that Rust is a major language?

No, because I was merely responding to your specific points and the extent is nowhere near the same. C++ had a huge market share before it turned 10. In the late nineties I was working on a critical air traffic control system, first used in 1995, written half in Ada half in C++. Around 1995-6 C++ was already ubiquitous in serious software.

> In the mid-80s, C still had plenty of major and healthy competitors, as pjmlp will imminently arrive to remind you.

He doesn't need to remind me because I was there. Yes, there were major competitors, yet C was already very near the top.

> Javascript was an also-ran everywhere except the web

That's pretty much where it is today, yet it's still #1 (if we count TS as part of JS).

> There are infinitely more people choosing to use Rust at the age of 11 than were choosing to use Javascript at the age of 11

The number of people using Rust professionally is a fraction of that of any of the languages we mentioned, plus many more (C#, PHP, Ruby, Go, Kotlin) at the same age. It's more similar to Ada's adoption at that age in size (of course, there wasn't much small OSS projects then at all, let alone written in Ada, but there were many more big, mission- and even safety-critical systems being written in Ada at that age than in Rust). Is it a serious language? Absolutely! But so far its trajectory doesn't resemble that of any language that's achieved wide popularity.

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