> These two languages were created and pushed by two of the largest corporations on the planet.
I don't think Rust lacks in hype and marketing. It doesn't buy ads in print magazines, but no language does anymore (that's exactly how VB, Delphi, FoxPro, Visual C++, and Java were marketed). And don't forget that while being well-known is necessary for success, it's far from sufficient.
There's also the matter that large corporations may let certain star personalities work on vanity projects, they tend not to invest too heavily in projects they think are unlikely to succeed. In other words, even corporations can't market their path to success, at least not for long. That's why they try to market the things they already believe have a chance of success. Sun acquired technologies developed for Smalltalk and diverted them to Java because they believed Java had a better chance of success.
> This seems to me like cherry picking
Quite the opposite, I think. I can't find a single example of a language with Rust's adoption at age 10 that ended up very popular.
> whereas Rust came from the side project of a lowly Mozilla software engineer
So did C++.
> If you're going to make this claim you've gotta back it up with some data.
I'm backing it up with the market and the idea that in a highly competitive market, any technology that carries a significant competitive advantage in shorter time-to-market or in better reputation etc. should be picked up - at least if it is well-known. It's the claim that a technology gives its adopter a competitive advantage and yet doesn't spread as quickly as previous similar technologies that requires explanation.
> Did anyone make that claim here?
This whole debate is over whether Rust has some "superabled" and unique bottom-line-affecting capabilities compared to Zig.
> Rust is programming language like any other, and at best it's an incremental improvement over current languages
If you see Rust as one avenue for incremental improvement over C++, then we're in complete agreement :)
I have received 3 transmissions from you so far, and you have yet to define "success" or "popularity", nor have you specified the threshold between "popular" and "very popular", despite having agreed with me that these things are not important for languages. Moreover, you haven't brought any figures to bear in supporting your claims. I think if we are going to continue this discussion, you have to substantiate your position -- otherwise I don't think you've said anything here that I haven't already responded to.
A specific definition of "popular" doesn't matter. What we can say is that Rust's market share at age 10 is lower than that of Fortran, COBOL, C, C++, VB, Python, JS, Java, C#, PHP, Ruby, TS, Kotlin, and Go at that age, but it's bigger than that of ML, Haskell, Erlang, and Clojure at that age. I don't know if I can compare its market share to that of Ada at that age. I'm nearly certain that much larger (and definitely more important) programs were written in Ada circa 1990 than are being written in Rust today, but it's hard for me to compare the number of programs.
Let's remember: Dancin' Duke Java Applets distributed with Netscape's web browser.
"Sun is giving away Java and HotJava free, in a fast-track attempt to make it a standard before Micro-soft begins shipping a similar product"
I don't think Rust lacks in hype and marketing. It doesn't buy ads in print magazines, but no language does anymore (that's exactly how VB, Delphi, FoxPro, Visual C++, and Java were marketed). And don't forget that while being well-known is necessary for success, it's far from sufficient.
There's also the matter that large corporations may let certain star personalities work on vanity projects, they tend not to invest too heavily in projects they think are unlikely to succeed. In other words, even corporations can't market their path to success, at least not for long. That's why they try to market the things they already believe have a chance of success. Sun acquired technologies developed for Smalltalk and diverted them to Java because they believed Java had a better chance of success.
> This seems to me like cherry picking
Quite the opposite, I think. I can't find a single example of a language with Rust's adoption at age 10 that ended up very popular.
> whereas Rust came from the side project of a lowly Mozilla software engineer
So did C++.
> If you're going to make this claim you've gotta back it up with some data.
I'm backing it up with the market and the idea that in a highly competitive market, any technology that carries a significant competitive advantage in shorter time-to-market or in better reputation etc. should be picked up - at least if it is well-known. It's the claim that a technology gives its adopter a competitive advantage and yet doesn't spread as quickly as previous similar technologies that requires explanation.
> Did anyone make that claim here?
This whole debate is over whether Rust has some "superabled" and unique bottom-line-affecting capabilities compared to Zig.
> Rust is programming language like any other, and at best it's an incremental improvement over current languages
If you see Rust as one avenue for incremental improvement over C++, then we're in complete agreement :)