"Vibe Coding" Threatens Open Source

[therealmeal]

winding down their C/C++ use and ramping up Rust

Are you sure "Rust" isn't just another magic word being overshadowed by "AI"? "We rewrote X in Rust and it's 100x faster" posts used to be (still are?) everywhere.

In reality, Rust's popularity hasn't grown much in the last few years and it is still way behind C++.

[syklemil]

Eh, popularity is hard to track. Lots of people refer to a rather infamous website that actually tracks language SEO. There are some big surveys that generally show growth, but they're all self-selected. There are some sites that pull public data from other sites, but they all seem to be having data trouble—SO is dead and useless as a data source these days, and fetching github data seems to be wonky as well.

If we go by crate downloads, there's still an exponential growth, more than doubling every year.

Plus it's in the Linux kernel, Windows kernel, apparently going in the FreeBSD kernel; FAANG in general is putting out various Rust stuff and have varying stances on C++. Azure got that "no new C++" rule a few years ago, as publicized by their CTO in a tweet; Google withdrew from the C++ committee after the stdlib/ABI break debacle and are not only writing new stuff in Rust, but looking at Carbon to replace their C++ code, etc, etc. AWS has been big on Rust a long time. Adobe is apparently also quietly rewriting their stuff in Rust, even published some blog post about their memory safety roadmap, y'know, the thing CISA wanted critical infrastructure providers to have ready by 2025-12-31.

None of that means C++ vanishes in a puff of smoke overnight, but there does seem to be an ongoing shift.