Am I spending 2x of the new hire's time making them learn a harder language? Am I spending 2x of a senior's time teaching the new hire?
What's the payoff in sticking with C++? Better libraries? Better tools? IDEs? That stuff will all shift as time goes on, if popularity is against it.
This is my standard stack for C++ and last time I checked Rust couldn't do any of them. This is also my standard stack for building new open source computer vision libraries, growing the available libraries and making my field more locked into C++, increasing the moat Rust would need to cross.
Next step, can I compile and deploy for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS? All of these are critical business requirements. This is whether I can adopt Rust in my employer's codebase.
Finally, can I easily find and hire engineers who can read and write Rust who aren't asking FAANG compensation levels? This is the blocker for Rust in startups.
The worst part about Rust's cross-platform compatibility and cross-compilation is Rust's dependence on a C linker and C/C++ dependencies if you choose to use them.
For the most part CMake handles the cross platform toolchain issues, so it's just one flag to turn on Release Vs Debug builds, enable LTO, include dependencies etc. Again, it's just platform specific features that require if...endif sections.
The complaints I'm seeing here would be the equivalent of me complaining about Rust's garbage collection, the only difference is that Rust broke everyone's code in removing it while C++ managed to keep almost everything since the 1980s still working.
Time goes on, business changes and computers become faster.
At some point, many developers started to see features like a garbage collector, become a good offer with few disadvantages.
Unless we really need the performance, do users really care if the program consumes a few cycles more, if those cycles are being spent on tools to make lives easier for developers, like a garbage collector?
90% of software wouldn't make sense to be written in C