Comment by thomashabets2
6 hours ago
What is your point?
I pointed to a jetbrains study, and then there's a stackoverflow survey[1] showing C neck and neck with PHP at 11th place among professional developers.
We all know there's lots of important C code out there. I don't see anyone going "RIIR!!!" in this thread.
But obviously yes, the 11th place language will have MANY programmers working on it. Not as many as JS by far. But many. In that survey Go is just after PHP. There are also many many Go programmers.
We are not yet at risk of running out of C programmers, like the Cobol situation. Nor do I want us to.[2]
But what point are you trying to make by so strongly defending C and the comment "grownups with important jobs write C"?
[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular... [2] relevant comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187384
The point I am trying to make is that C is a production language and Rust is not a production language, so the original comment is pretty much correct if you take adults with jobs to mean writing software used in production. People use JS, your JS engine is written in C++, running in a browser written in C++, running on an OS written in C/++. Whatever higher-level language you use, it's powered by C/++. Your game engines are written in C/++. Your fucking car is written in C. It's not even an argument about what is better or what people should use or anything like that. It's just acknowledging reality. You're talking about how "writing new C in 2026 is misconduct" like it's a relic of a bygone era when in actuality the world around you is a world written entirely in C with, rounded to a whole percent, literally 0% of the software anyone uses being written in Rust.
You have a point but it's just hyperbole in the other direction. Yes, Rust is only a small fraction of the code in use every day, but it has nonetheless achieved deep penetration into critical infrastructure.
Cloudflare's network routing code is predominantly Rust. Massive parts of AWS and Azure are Rust (including crown jewels like S3 and Lambda). Multiple car manufacturers have shipping Rust code in their production cars for years, albeit yes it's a slow process intoroducing it into regulated industries. Airbus and Boeing are putting up job openings for Rust development. As mentioned critical pieces of Windows and Android are now written in Rust. If you use Discord - that's Rust. If you use Amazon Prime Video or Disney+, that's Rust. I could go on.
When like 40% of internet traffic and 75% of end user devices are using Rust in some capacity, to say that it's "not production" is just ignorant, arrogant nonsense.
> Rust is not a production language because so much legacy code
You must not exist, because, rounded to a whole percent, literally 0% of the lives of people in the world are directly affected by you personally
> Rust is not a production language
Your argument was that the only Rust projects there are are little developer tools, so Rust isn't a production language. When pointed out there are large projects that every day users rely on that use Rust, and not just in corners of the codebase, code that's exercised by approximately all users, you insist it's still not production?
In less than a year tons of Chromium features will be Rust based.
Even big bases as FFMPEG will be ported to Rust, as the porters' repos already use Rust's cc to compile ASM code.
And of course Qemu will be almost a mandatory candidate for obvious reasons.
For instance, quick and dirty SGI Irix emulator:
https://github.com/techomancer/iris