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So your solution for there being to many languages is for somebody to create one more. And the main thing you want from that language is that it have no corporate sponsorship, such that whoever creates it will have to bear the financial burden personally.

Look no further than Clojure to see that it can be done. And I offer that as a 100% neutral statement.

Kinda. Clojure peaked interest around 2015 and has been declining ever since.

I think if it wasn't tied to the JVM ecosystem, it probably would have seen a lot more success outside of server side stuff. The long bootstrapping startup really is a killjoy. Then again, a lot of the type that made it popular in the first place came from being a part of the JVM ecosystem.

Clojure is and will always be a niche language.

> Why don't we have a single language so that we can do cross platform development

We do, we have dozens of them, C, C++, java, ruby, python, c# to name a few. We have at least a half dozen cross platform GUI toolkits to go with them, Qt, Gtk, swing, wxWidgets, tk. Pick whatever poison you want, they're all much better than electron.

I suspect you're right about rust though, something newer and shinier will come along soon, if it hasn't already.

> Why don't we have a single language so that we can do cross platform development and abandon web browsers and javascript?

What does that even mean? What do you lack in regards to cross-platform from Java / Rust / Nim / Go / Python / Ruby / Haxe / ...? (I'm assuming cross-platform here means desktops, not microprocessors)

Specifically, yes, there are things that you may miss in every one of them, but it's not like we don't have the option to use them. What's the point in complete unification in the first place?

He means cross platform ui frameworks. Afaik, only flutter has support for most platforms. It supports web, desktop and mobile.

> It's only a game developer of all people, Jonathan Blow, that's doing it and his creation is a C++ replacement for games, not general purpose software. Sigh.

That would still be huge. C++ keeps being used because of games. There's little to no C++ software being written nowadays that's not games.

And games are a gigantic industry, bigger than the film and music industries combined.

Many game developers would love the simplicity of D if there was a framework like Unreal but in D.

> There's little to no C++ software being written nowadays that's not games.

You need to look around more, because you are totally wrong on this point. It's true that C++ isn't used a lot in web programming, and web programming is what a lot of people see these days. But there is a lot more software being written than web programming and games, and C++ is still in fairly significant use.

I do write a tiny bit of this not gaming C++. And I feel extremely alone in what I do.

So please, instead of being snarky, do something useful and show me some of this software!

Well, I work in embedded systems. They tend toward C++ on higher-end systems and C on lower end. So it's your wireless router, your printer, your car, your washing machine, the medical devices at your hospital... all over the place.

But embedded is maybe 10% of code. Where else is it used? I'm not as sure of that, but the TIOBE index indicates that it's used pretty heavily.

I'm outside of that world, but I think that high-performance computing sometimes uses C++, because controlling memory alignment is a big deal there, and C++ does that pretty well.

The origin story of Go says that Google has a lot of C++, but that was a decade ago. I can't speak to how much new C++ is being written there.

Perhaps one way of looking at it would be to look at the membership of the C++ standards committee, and subtracting the language vendors. The rest are users.

On Web, desktop, mobile and distributed computing space, which are the areas I am focused on, C++ is indeed still used, however no longer for full stack applications like it used to be 20 years ago.

Rather we get to write the applications in some managed language, and C++ only gets used for some performance critical libraries, or GPGPU programming.

The new and shiny has already moved on to Pony, Zig, or whatever.

Possibly nim as well. But We should be able to provide interop between llvm and gcc so they can all cross pollinate in some way? Not saying it’s easy, nor that I have the skills to do it, but we should be able to build across boundaries and stop soloing so much?

I don’t hear much about Nim. Will this language ever take off? It seems this language needs a large corporation backing it, to get a chance to succeed.

Nim's compiler was full of bugs and would crash on trivial programs for a long time. It also has garbage collection so ends up in a different niche.

Just like Zig not parsing tabs or carriage returns or V being broken on windows and never fixed, I don't think it is corporate sponsorship that is the problem, but more basic utility.

Plenty of people are trying these new languages, the demand is there, but there is usually some huge blind spot that they don't deal with until it is too late and they have already burned a lot of people that gave them their attention.

Yeah I didn’t know about the bugs.. still, the idea / design is good. Hopefully they get it sorted out

Probably, but it could also be a positive as it is not beholden to one of the major tech companies.

>People who use Rust aren't using it to solve real world problems

Like a browser? Or google's fuchsia?

Have some fun: https://www.rust-lang.org/production/users

You know what WASM is?

I understand that people who use and like Rust would find my comment off-putting but there is no need to be snide.

There are precisely 0 job openings looking for Rust developers in my city, and I live in a city with millions of people.

To me, that's the real world where real people solve real world problems.

To me, when 0 people are hiring for Rust in a city in North America where there are maybe 10 other cities bigger than the one I live in, real problems aren't being solved using this language.

Sorry, that's empirical evidence, not opinion.

I understand that in a few places, people are using Rust and some are even getting paid to do it. I call that scratching the novelty itch - I'm sorry if my use of language offends your sensibilities, we'll have to learn to live with that somehow :)

>To me, that's the real world where real people solve real world problems.

Problems are technical, hiring is something completely different.

I live in a really small city and found 3 offers for Rust and 7 for Go (some of them are 'bonus points')...in Europe..and none of them are GAFA related.

But yes, it's a new language, java c/c++ is not.

Its certainly growing. For such a young language, its being thrown at projects that would have required c/c++ previously.

here's one notable one https://onesignal.com/blog/rust-at-onesignal/