On the other hand I can't wait when Swift becomes general, non-Apple language, available on most platforms (including the most popular one) "with batteries" - that will be the end of Go and Rust I think :)
Will it? I don't think so, although I think Swift is great. IMHO Rust targets another market compared to Swift. Rust feels more low-level, e.g. Swift uses Reference Counting for everything. Swift also can't give you some of the nice guarantees you get in Rust.
Go also has some nice stuff compared to Swift: simplicity, goroutines or tracing GC. Go is also already widely used.
Swift is certainly great for Mac/iOS-Development, but I am somewhat skeptical for other platforms. I am afraid that non-apple-platforms will always feel a bit like second-class. It's just not Apple's main priority and most Swift-devs will always be paid by Apple. But who knows, I may be wrong.
worth mentioning that this term has a broader meaning than how some rust evangelists use it.
one common sentiment promulgated by rust evangelists is, for example, that go is 'not a systems language' because it has a GC. however, this definitional exclusion doesn't seem to align with (evidently broader) historical use of the term 'systems language'.
Yes, it may work with some type of systems, but this does not make it a systems language. If you don't want to accept this fact, then you have bigger problems or you reality is narrow.
Maybe this can help you see through your bubble: https://github.com/CppCon/CppCon2017/blob/master/Presentatio...
I've gotten Rust code to run on an ATSAMD21G18 Arm Cortex M0 (Adafruit Feather board). That board has 256K flash and 32K RAM. Go executables can't even fit in the program flash! Considering the sheer number of systems that have microcontrollers in them somewhere it would be very hard to call a language that doesn't support them a "systems" language. Maybe "applications language" would be more appropriate.
Whoever is smart will take note of what happened to VisualBasic and is happening to Objective-C.
If one evaluates C# they should obviously look at what MS are doing. Same thing for Swift and Apple.
C++ is one of the healthiest languages in existance. It hits all the important checkboxes of standardisation, wide industry and platform support and large community.
It is just like trying to compile the Linux kernel with clang instead of gcc, with the source code full of gcc extensions.
In short, we're quite safe in terms of if C#, Swift and Go will live on. They will.
C# and to some extent Swift are also two huge platforms, there are very few organisations out there that would be able to steer their development.
Finally, they are not standardised in any way. MS tried something with 2.0 and then gave up.
My impression is that these two live and die by the will of their corporate masters. I'm not saying they will kill them or anything, that would be pretty stupid of them to do.
They are standardized, you just need to look at the right place.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-refe...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/referen...
At the end of the day if a language proves popular enough in other domains outside of the area which is directly controlled by the language maintainers, then the community will usually find a way of taking over maintenance of it.
We've seen this with Pascal, various BASIC dialects (including Visual Basic), and to an extent Java too. The problem with Objective-C was that - as far as I'm aware at least - it wasn't widely used outside of Apple / NeXT's ecosystem so if Apple deprecate support for Objective-C on their own platforms then there's little incentive for the community to keep using language (much like the problems with Visual Basic - which is why few know about it's open source forks). But languages like C# and Go are used massively across a multitude of domains so even if MS/Google were to kill them tomorrow, the community would almost certainly find a way to keep language alive. Heck, Go might even become more popular if that happened since many of the complaints against it are down to the highly opinionated approach of the current leadership.
Let's also not forget that Go and C# tooling are open source so the community wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel like they did with Delphi / Object Pascal and Visual Basic.
Please note that I am not demeaning your statement. It's a legitimate curiosity on my side.
You would be crazy to use swift (or objc) in real-time stuff. You would be crazy to write a UI-heavy app in rust. (note: I'm talking about high level DOM-like manipulation, not about rendering engines)
In the same lane of thought, I am in love with Go when it comes to microservices, network libraries/bridges and CLI tools but it's very ill-suited for web development. So I shrugged it off and only do web dev with Elixir.
Conversely, Elixir is awesome for a multitude of things but it absolutely can't compete with Go in its strong areas.
Language wars are pointless.
I think the jury is still out on that one. I agree with the current state of things but the potential to ease and facilitate this is tremendous through the use of syntax extensions (procedural macros) which can dramatically simplify that use case. In general I think procedural macros add a _lot_ of versatility/flexibility to the language. I anticipate that there will be a huge boom in that area once they stabilize, and it will catch many people by surprise.
An example of the versatility that they enable is the work-in-progress async/await [0], whereas in other languages they would usually have to be implemented in the language itself. Note that this does not preclude their implementation in the language itself, but since it's a work-in-progress they're able to experiment with them without having to implement them in the language from the beginning.