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by nickysielicki6 hours ago |
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upvoteby wolvesechoes1 hours ago|
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> that has resulted in mindshare death as of 2026

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.

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upvoteby mcherm1 hours ago|
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Being started? I would take that bet.
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upvoteby the_duke5 hours ago|
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Rust has managed just fine to remain mostly backwards compatible since 1.0 , while still allowing for evolution of the language through editions.

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.

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upvoteby melodyogonna3 hours ago|
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Rust started in 2006 and reached v1 in 2015, that's 9 years.
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upvoteby fouronnes36 hours ago|
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Mindshare death is a very large overstatement given the massive amount of legacy C++ out there that will be maintained by poor souls for year to come. But you are right, there used to be a great language hiding within C++ if the committee ever dared to break backwards compat. But even if they did it now it would be too late and they'd just end up with a worse Rust or Zig.
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upvoteby munificent5 hours ago|
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The biggest problem with C++ is that while everyone agrees there is a great language hiding in it, everyone also has a remarkably different idea of what that great language actually is.
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upvoteby tialaramex48 minutes ago|
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I don't agree there's a great language hiding in C++. My high level objections would be that the type system is garbage and the syntax is terrible, so you'd need a different type system and syntax and that's nothing close to C++ after the changes.

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.

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upvoteby ChrisGreenHeur2 hours ago|
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There are multiple great languages hiding within it
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upvoteby pjmlp5 hours ago|
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As proven a few times, it doesn't matter if committee decides to break something if compiler vendors aren't on board with what is being broken.

There is still this disconnection on how languages under ISO process work in the industry.

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upvoteby jonstewart47 minutes ago|
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The C++ standards committee’s antiquated reliance on compiler “vendors” holds it back. They should adopt maintenance of clang and bless it as the reference compiler.
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upvoteby pjmlp5 hours ago|
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There is a reason GCC, LLVM, CUDA, Metal, HPC,.. rely on C++ and will never rewrite to something else, including Zig.
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upvoteby flohofwoe1 hours ago|
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Looking at LLVM build times I seriously believe that C would have been the better choice :/ (it wouldn't be a problem if LLVM wouldn't be the base for so many other projects)

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).

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upvoteby pjmlp50 minutes ago|
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CUDA, SYSCL, HLSL evolution roadmap, and Khronos future for Vulkan beg to differ with your opinion.
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upvoteby surajrmal4 hours ago|
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Yes, inertia. If those projects started today, they would likely choose rust.
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upvoteby pjmlp3 hours ago|
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Why isn't rustc using Cranelift then?
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upvoteby norman7843 hours ago|
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I can think a few reasons:

- 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)

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upvoteby pjmlp2 hours ago|
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So it isn't just a matter of "they would use Rust instead".

There is a whole ecosystem of contributions across the globe and the lingua franca used by those contributors.

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upvoteby quotemstr5 hours ago|
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Hilariously, they broke this compatibility. std::auto_ptr was an abomination, but removing it from the language was needless and undermined the long term stability that differentiates C++ from upstarts.
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upvoteby ChrisGreenHeur2 hours ago|
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those that used it were rightly punished by the removal
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