There aren't that may new projects where rust would be a good fit. And projects in C++ won't be rewritten in rust.
Google (collectively) have written quite a bit about Rust adoption going back at least a couple of years. It'd kinda surprise me if there weren't some drive to write gmail/googledocs in Rust and deliver them as WASM. Meta/Facebook have some strong internal Rust evangelism going on.
I doubt it's a good idea, but it's likely my first trial "lets write a Rust project" will be an in-browser Rust/WASM thing.
What kind of apps?
On the backend there are plenty of mature ecosystems already that have been around for decades. Even focusing only on performance there's not a huge difference with say .NET or Java when looking at web benchmarks like TechEmpower[1].
On the frontend nothing can really beat the DX of using Vite with JS (hot reload of JS components, styles, etc). I don't know if it's even possible to get hot reload with WASM.
I could be wrong but it sounds like doing a complex web project in Rust would be a pain with not a lot of benefits over more popular and mature solutions.
[1] https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#hw=ph&test=fortune&s...
Heh? I really like Rust, but it has absolutely zero advantage for this domain compared to the existing million choices. Unless you are doing some low-end web stuff with packets, any managed language will have a much better developer experience. Async rust is not particularly easy, and something like Java's virtual threads will give you both the ergonomics and the throughput, and then we haven't even talked about how much bigger the relevant ecosystem is (remember that the only order of magnitude improvement in dev productivity is from code you don't have to write)
Aren't almost all new projects that otherwise would have been written in C or C++ good fits for Rust?
The C++ ecosystem is too strong.
There are many industries like game dev and audio dev where C++ is not going to be replaced any time soon, even for new projects.
Also plenty of apps that need high performance crossplatform GUI will probably keep relying on QT. Apps like Da Vinci Resolve or Autodesk Maya.
Certainly a lot, and most new C/C++ (and even Go) projects will mention that they considered Rust before choosing a different language.
Second, it's obviously much easier to double your user base from 2 to 4, than from 10 million to 20. New languages tend to have a fast initial growth, but then the curve flattens and no significant change comes after. Java hasn't been on a decline in the absolute sense, the whole market has just grown and has more players now, so the same mindshare gives less of a percentage now. Nonetheless, no language has come even close to the top 3 languages (js, python, java) in popularity that were released in the last 20 years, so what makes you think that Rust will be the one that avoids the flattening of its growth?
Sure, lots of new project/code uses languages like Go these days. But Java is still very dominant, especially at companies like Amazon. It currently sits ar #3 on TIOBE.
