Comment by pron
10 hours ago
I don't think that a language that was meant to compete with C++ and in 10+ years hasn't captured 10% of C++'s (already diminished) market share could be said to have become "kind of the default" for anything (and certainly not when that requires generalising from n≅1).
It has for Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and the Linux kernel.
It remains to be seen which big name will make Zig unavoidable.
> It has for Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and the Linux kernel.
I don't think so. I don't know about Adobe, but it's not a meaningful statement for the rest. Those companies default to writing safe code in languages other than Rust, and the Linux kernel defaults to unsafe code in C. BTW, languages favoured by those projects/companies do not reliably represent industry-wide preferences, let alone defaults. You could certainly say that of the two languages accepted so far in the Linux kernel, the only safe one is Rust, but there's hardly any "default" there.
> It remains to be seen which big name will make Zig unavoidable.
I have no idea whether or not Zig will ever be successful, but at this point it's pretty clear that Rust's success has been less than modest at best.
It is a clear mandate on those companies that whatever used to be C or C++, should be written in Rust for green field development.
Whatever could be done in programming languages with automatic memory management was already being done.
Anyone deploying serverless code into Amazon instances is running of top of Firecracker, my phone has Rust code running on it, and whatever Windows 11 draws something into the screen, it goes through Rust rewrite of the GDI regions logic, all the Azure networking traffic going through Azure Boost cards does so via Rust firmware.
Adobe is the sponsor for the Hylo programming language, and key figures in the C++ community, are doing Rust talks nowadays.
"Adobe’s memory safety roadmap: Securing creativity by design"
https://blog.adobe.com/security/adobes-memory-safety-roadmap...
Any hobby language author would like to have 1% of the said modest Rust's success, I really don't get the continuous downplay of such achievement.
3 replies →
While certain teams within Google are using rust by default, I'm not sure rust is anywhere close in scale for new lines of code committed per week to c++.
For Android specifically, by Q3 of last year more new lines of Rust were being added per week than new lines of C++: https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move...
The problem is that the number of browser engines is n=2.
Interestingly, Ladybird, which aims at being the n = 3, is also written in C++.