Finally, subjectively, C++ isn’t drawing in the crowds. We have never had a lot of C++ contributors. Over the 11 years fish used C++, only 17 people have at least 10 commits to the C++ code. We also don’t know a lot of people who would love to work on a C++ codebase in their free time.
Hard to tank when you don’t have many to begin with. Rust is far nicer to new users to contribute to then old C++ code. Which can be seen in their github - in the last 24 months 16 people have contributed more then 10 commits. Which is during the conversion period - I dont expect that many of those to be C++ contributions. So rust does not seem to have hurt their contributions at all and in fact looks to have helped.
Syntax is in a large part what people are used to. Which is trivial to change by just using the thing for a while and getting used to the different syntax. But syntax is only part of a language. The tooling, documentation, error messages, and general feed back are all IMO much nicer in rust than C++. It is also easier to people new to programming or used to other languages to get into than C++ is, even including the syntax into that.
C++ was one of the first languages I learnt - and now after not using it for years I cannot stand its syntax.
You may be right, I don’t have enough experience talking to new programmers in order to comment on that part specifically, but I do think a sizeable portion of existing C++ devs who don’t want to use rust exist, and this may now be a problem moving forward, especially if the C++ committee keeps dragging their feet and never adopt any new safety extensions.
Personally I think the swift syntax is much more familiar and friendly to existing C++ devs, but its popularity does not seem anywhere near rust’s level for some reason, but maybe now that a truly cross-platform version has been released, it might gain some traction… maybe.
Taking bets on the number of useful contributors about to tank.
I’ll take the other side!
From their blog post:
Hard to tank when you don’t have many to begin with. Rust is far nicer to new users to contribute to then old C++ code. Which can be seen in their github - in the last 24 months 16 people have contributed more then 10 commits. Which is during the conversion period - I dont expect that many of those to be C++ contributions. So rust does not seem to have hurt their contributions at all and in fact looks to have helped.
Perhaps it depends on what people are used to. I use C++ regularly and I find rust syntax much too painful to look at.
Rust was painful to look at until I started using it for more than 6 or so months
Syntax is in a large part what people are used to. Which is trivial to change by just using the thing for a while and getting used to the different syntax. But syntax is only part of a language. The tooling, documentation, error messages, and general feed back are all IMO much nicer in rust than C++. It is also easier to people new to programming or used to other languages to get into than C++ is, even including the syntax into that.
C++ was one of the first languages I learnt - and now after not using it for years I cannot stand its syntax.
You may be right, I don’t have enough experience talking to new programmers in order to comment on that part specifically, but I do think a sizeable portion of existing C++ devs who don’t want to use rust exist, and this may now be a problem moving forward, especially if the C++ committee keeps dragging their feet and never adopt any new safety extensions.
Personally I think the swift syntax is much more familiar and friendly to existing C++ devs, but its popularity does not seem anywhere near rust’s level for some reason, but maybe now that a truly cross-platform version has been released, it might gain some traction… maybe.