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Comment by LoveGracePeace | Hacker News Reader

I'm very confused. Rust is mainstream? C, C++, Java, C#, Python, JavaScript are all what I would call mainstream. Rust is not a language that comes to mind at all.

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Rust has hit the point where it's in the conversation for what language you'd write a new project in, even for big companies (typically the most lethargic). I'd say it's at the level of mainstream where there's Rust being written in a significant portion of the industry, but not at the level of mainstream where it's somewhere in the stack behind most of organised society

Pretty damn mainstream nowadays, yes. Quite a few big tech companies are either actively doing much of their new systems programming in Rust, or else dipping their toes in.

I honestly don't know of a big tech company that is happy with the idea of just continuing to use C++ indefinitely - they are _all_ looking for alternatives, and Rust is the most obvious option.

> Quite a few big tech companies are either actively doing much of their new systems programming in Rust, or else dipping their toes in

I don't think that's true. It seems to me that a lot of people believe this simply because a lot of other people believe it. You see it everywhere. "Oracle rewriting MySQL in Rust". "Microsoft rewrites Skype in Rust". "Linus Torvalds rewriting Linux in Rust". I have yet to see proof of any of it.

> I have yet to see proof of any of it.

It looks like you're actively avoiding finding that evidence.

Citing clickbait titles doesn't sound like you have actually looked.

It is true. I’m not basing my statements off random info I gleaned from the internet.

> I honestly don't know of a big tech company that is happy with the idea of just continuing to use C++ indefinitely

Every game company ever. And Google.

The Google team I work on (ChromeOS, crosvm[0] specifically) has been transitioning to Rust for a lot of our new services (mostly crosvm and stuff that interacts with it) and I couldn't be happier :)

[0] https://google.github.io/crosvm/

The claim was "continuing to use C++ indefinitely." For that not to be true they'd have to be looking at replacing C++ entirely. Moving everything to rust/go/whatever. Do you foresee Google doing that?

Google as a company? Not necessarily, I don't have a crystal ball.

ChromeOS as a product? Maybe. (note: not Chrome)

ChromeOS platform internals? I totally could. You don't just rewrite everything from C++ to Rust, because that wouldn't make much sense, but more and more new service/products are being spun up that use Rust (we have docs and stuff https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/r...).

This is not accurate.

More people pick up coding C++ professionally in any given week than the total being paid to code Rust full time.

The bigger a company is, the more various languages people there dabble in, and the less it means that somebody there dabbles in your favorite. You would better add up revenue (NB: not market cap) of companies specializing in using your favorite language; but that number would be disappointingly small for any language as far from maturity as Rust still is.

I wasn't aware that restating an entrenched state of affairs is an argument in a discussion.

Doubly so when that entrenched state of affairs is actively being attacked every day for years now.

But sure, let me not stop you.

Just checked Rust job offers on Linkedin in my country (France): 338.

C++: 27 172

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