The forever backwards compatible promise of C++ was a tremendous design mistake that has resulted in mindshare death as of 2026. It might suck to have to modify your code to continue to get it to work, but it’s the right long term approach.
I could make a bet that as of 2026 still more C++ projects are being started than Rust + Zig combined.
World is much more vast than ShowHN and GitHub would indicate.
There is still this disconnection on how languages under ISO process work in the industry.
By the way this applies to the C language so beloved on this corner as well.
As it does to COBOL, Fortran, Ada and JS (ECMA is not much different from ISO).
After many years of insisting that "dialects" of C++ are a terrible idea, despite the reality that most C++ users have a specific dialect they use - Bjarne Stroustrup has endorsed essentially the same thing but as "profiles" to address safety issues. So for people who think there is a "great language" in there perhaps in C++ 29 or C++ 32 you will be able to find out for yourselves that you're wrong.
This puts much more work on the compiler development side, but it's a great boon for the ecosystem.
To be fair, zig is pre 1.0, but Zig is also already 8 years old. Rust turned 1.0 at ~ 5 years, I think.
- Cranelift applies less optimizations in exchange for faster compilation times, because it was developed to compile WASM (wasmtime), but turns out that is good enough for Rust debug builds.
- Cranelift does not support the wide range of platforms (AFAIK just X86_64 and some ARM targets)
There is a whole ecosystem of contributions across the globe and the lingua franca used by those contributors.
which is slowly changing with wider rust adaptation.
It's notable that the projects you mentioned mostly don't need to deal with adversarial user input, while the projects I mentioned do. That's one area that Rust shines in.
Android team is quite clear that Java, Kotlin, C and C++ are the official languages for app developers.
Chrome even has less Rust than Firefox.
Linux has some baby adoption, and it isn't without drama, even with Microsoft and Google pushing for it.
Chrome only needs to replace the parts of their codebase that handle untrusted input with Rust to get substantial benefits. Like codec parsers. They don't need to rewrite everything, just the parts that need rewriting. The parts that are impossible to get right in C++, to the point where Chrome spins up separate processes to run that code.
Rust is the future for Android, and it will become an important of Chrome and Linux and git (starting 3.0). That's just the way it is.
Same for the Metal shading language. C++ adds exactly nothing useful to a shading language over a C dialect that's extended with vector and matrix math types (at least they didn't pick ObjC or Swift though).
...that's just because of the traditional-game-dev Stockholm syndrome towards C++ (but not too much C++ please!).
> Khronos future for Vulkan
As far as I'm aware Khronos is not planning to move the Vulkan API to C++ - and the 'modern C++' sample code which adds a C++ RAII wrapper on top of the Vulkan C API does more harm than good (especially since lifetime management for Vulkan object is a bit more involved than just adding a class wrapper with a destructor).
There is more than one sample using C++, now they make use of C++20, including modules if desired.
It's in line with many other shitty design decisions coming out of Khronos, so I'm not even surprised ;)
IMHO it's a pretty big problem when the spec is on an entirely different abstraction level than the sample code (those new samples also move significant code into 'helper classes', which means all the interesting stuff is hidden away).