> developer marketing person
What is that?
> They aren't going after C++ gurus or C magicians
Don't they have anything to gain from using Rust?
What is that?
> They aren't going after C++ gurus or C magicians
Don't they have anything to gain from using Rust?
Rust does market to C/++ people, a lot. We just don't market to the super-awesome C++ folks. It's the same reason I preferred Word 2003 over the new stuff for half a decade. I had years of memorized shortcuts, custom macros, and general ui familiarity. I could eventually learn the shiny new Word and become as good, but the activation energy for that is too much and I was happy with 2003.
Rust isn't only going after non-systems folks. The community is roughly half systemsy. But it may seem this way because Rust tries very hard to not alienate non-systems people with jargon and unexplained systems concepts.
C++ gurus and C magicians already have invested too deep into their languages to throw everything away and start from zero.
For example I love Rust and play occasionally with it, but for the time being C++ is my native language on the job when I need to use a native language outside .NET or JVM.
I know it since the C++ARM "standard" and we depend on standard OS tooling that Rust is still catching up with.
The day will come when our customers will be able to do mixed debugging between JVM/.NET and Rust. Or produce COM as easy as C++ compilers do.
But these are things that beginners in systems programming aren't usually doing.
I'm not a C++ guru, but I think modern C++ is powerful enough that it doesn't feel lacking in features compared to rust, like C does. There is less of a draw for seasoned C++ programmers.
Rust seems to be gaining a lot of momentum and I am becoming more and more confident that it will be regarded as a major language for embedded and general systems programming and possibly even a successor to C.
Just check the feature list and type safety differences. The only advantage from C was being less fragmented than Pascal dialects.
So I became a C++ hipster (if that would be a thing in the 90's).
We used to have the same heat from C guys that C# and other language users nowadays have from systems languages.
Hence why I am always supportive of new programming languages that target the same use cases.
>Don't they have anything to gain from using Rust?
Who's "they"?
People are very hard to dislodge from such positions, unless the new positions have overwhelming benefits such as: a new environment does not support the old tools/programming language; a radical paradigm shift has happened that risks to make completely obsolete their previous knowledge, etc.
Rust is more of an incremental improvement over C++, than a radical leap forward. So C++ magicians are less likely to want to switch over.
Sure they do, but they're not throwing away a decade of hard-won experience in their specialties just to tinker; at least not with production code bases. The barrier of entry for beginner systems programmers is lower.
Thing is, it's a bit like switching from Python 2 to Python 3. Why would I move to this new environment where I would need to recode everything from scratch? Python 3 will take decades to overthrow its predecessor, how long will it be for Rust? Will it ever succeed? Will the C++ committee react and borrow some of Rust awesomeness? Can I find co-workers willing to learn Rust?