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Comment by Gibbon1 | Hacker News Reader

C is a niche language and C++ is about to hit the wall as companies abandon it for languages like Go and Rust.

You're high. In industry C and C++ are very widespread. Go and Rust are ... not. You'll have an easier time finding a job that requires FORTRAN than one requiring Rust, and Go is only a bit more popular.

Well, you go to C++ for the climate; you go to Go or Rust for... the company!

Lets touch base again in five years and see how C++ is doing.

Let's touch base in five years and see if anybody remembers Rust. It is likely they will, but not assured.

Consider that the number of programmers adopting C++ every day far, far exceeds the number adopting Rust, and the rate is increasing faster, in absolute numbers, than ever before, it is hard to imagine any scenario where C++ is less popular, relative to Rust, than today. Yes, C++ usage will less than double, while Rust usage will multiply, but the absolute difference in number will be much larger than today.

You seem to underestimate the vast amounts of existing C++ and C code. That code is not going anywhere, especially in only 5 years. Companies are not going to rewrite stuff in Rust just because of memory and type safety.

Touch base in 5 years... Rust will still be a niche language due to its complexity. (IMO, Go has a better chance of at least picking up a few percentage points.)

C++ is noticeably safer than C but C is still more widespread. Safety doesn't really sell.

I write C every day in embedded RISC-V. I think Rust looks neat, and would find it cool to use. But I just convinced the team to move off of gnu90, and a huge amount of my work is in assembly.

Rust offers the idea of safety and security, but at the same time hedges itself with unsafe - fine, sure. However, my work would be nearly 100% in unsafe. So it results in an unpredictable, complex, unsafe language - a non starter.

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