Maybe you and I have different working definitions of "relative", but Rust hit 1.0 only 10 years ago, whereas the age of the most popular languages is 30+ years. In that sense Rust is relatively young. Indeed, Rust is the youngest language in the TIOBE top 20, and it's more popular than other languages which have been around much longer. The only language which comes close is Swift, and that one had the advantage of Apple pushing it as the main language for iOS development, Rust never had that kind of marketing and corporate support.
And the rest of those basically had no competition in their domain when they started 30+ years ago. Rust now has to grow next to 30 years of those languages maturing, and convince people to abandon all existing community resources - whereas those languages did not.
Having a low adoption rate is normal in this day and age. Go is kind of an anomaly caused by it's backing by Google.
But it doesn't help that Rust is also in the native space, whose devs are especially stubborn, and is a difficult language with painful syntax.
That's not true, as anyone who was programming back then (like me) knows. Java had serious competition from VB, Delphi, and a host of other "RAD" languages as they were called back then (and not long before, the language that the magazines were touting as "the future" was Smalltalk). All of them were heavily marketed. C++, of course, had to compete against an established incumbent, C, and another strong contender, Ada (Ada, BTW, was about as popular in 1990, when it was 10 years old, as Rust is today, although bigger, more important software projects were being written in Ada in 1990 than are being written in Rust today). Python and Ruby both were both competing with the very powerful incumbent, Perl. PHP, of course, had Java to compete with, as did C#. Some of these languages had strong backers, but some started out as very small operations (Python, C++, PHP), and some languages with very strong backers did poorly (Delphi, FoxPro).
Again, I have no idea if Rust will ever really take off, but its adoption at this advanced age, despite no lack of marketing, would be extraordinarily low for a language that becomes very popular.
> But it doesn't help that Rust is also in the native space, whose devs are especially stubborn
Perhaps, but Fortran, C, and C++, were all in this space and they all spread rather quickly. Microsoft, a company with a fondness for complicated languages, chose to write significant portions of their flagship OS in C++ when the language was only five years old.
It's true that the market share of low-level languages has been shrinking for several decades now and continues to shrink, but also isn't really a good news for a language that for at least a decade has been trying to get a significant share of that shrinking market, and has been having a hard time at that.
> and is a difficult language with painful syntax.
Yes, but this, too, isn't a point in favour of betting on Rust's future success. Other difficult or complex languages indeed had a harder time getting much adoption in their first decade, but things also didn't pick up for them in their second decade.
The latest bloomer of the bunch is Python, but if Rust ever becomes very popular (even as popular as C++ is today), it would need to break Python's record. That's not impossible, but it would be highly unusual. Low adoption in the first decade has virtually always been a predictor of low adoption down the line, too.
Edit: just to add some more anecdotal evidence from my memory of languages I used: java community was pretty bigger than rust at 10. Go's was much smaller than rust at 10. I'd be happy to check my beliefs against actual data :)
I agree that of all popular languages, Python is the latest bloomer, but while it became popular for applications and data processing rather late, it was used a lot for scripting well before then.
> Go's was much smaller than rust at 10
Go turned 10 (if we want to count from 1.0) only 3 years ago, and Go's adoption in 2022 was much bigger than Rust's today.
There's no way that can be true.
But I don't think the comparison you're trying to make works, because then isn't now.
In general, in order to convince someone to leave their current tools, you have to not only be better but a lot better. As in, you need to offer the entire feature set of the old tool plus something else compelling enough to overcome the network effects (ecosystem + years of experience + job prospects) of the prior environment.
So when C++ came on the scene, they had to compete against ~20 years of accumulated legacy systems and language history. Rust had to compete with 50 years of legacy systems and language history.
Moreover, developer expectations are a lot different today. Back then, C++ was what, a compiler and some docs? Python was an interpreter and some docs? Maybe an IRC channel? Today, it's not enough to reach 1.0, you also have to deliver a package manager, robust 3rd party library ecosystem, language server tooling, a robust community with support for new devs, etc. So timescales for language development are getting longer than they were back then.
Also, I don't know why you've chosen "very popular" as a metric. Very popular isn't something a language needs to be, it just needs to be big enough to sustain a community. Being top 20 within 10 years is certainly in that realm. You can see that other language communities have existed for longer and are much smaller. And anyway, the entire developer population today is much larger than it was back then; you can have a small percentage of all developers but still large enough to be robust. I don't know the math, maybe someone can figure it out, but I wouldn't be surprised if 1% of developers today is inflation adjusted to like 10%-20% of developers in 1996. So Rust is probably as big as it needs to be to sustain itself, it doesn't have to be a "very popular" language if that means being in the top 5 or whatever the threshold is.
It's very popular compared to Prolog or Haskell, but not compared to languages people use professionally: https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...
> In general, in order to convince someone to leave their current tools, you have to not only be better but a lot better.
I agree.
> So when C++ came on the scene, they had to compete against ~20 years of accumulated legacy systems and language history. Rust had to compete with 50 years of legacy systems and language history.
Ok, but Go and TypeScript are pretty much the same age, and when Java came out, it took over much of C++'s market very quickly.
I agree Rust has some clear benefits over C++, but it also has intrinsic challenges that go well beyond mere industry momentum (and other languages have shown that momentum is very much defeatable).
> Moreover, developer expectations are a lot different today.
But there are more programmers today, and many more people worked on Rust than on C++ in its early years. And besides, Rust has had all those things you mentioned for quite some time, and C++ still doesn't have some of them.
> Also, I don't know why you've chosen "very popular" as a metric. Very popular isn't something a language needs to be, it just needs to be big enough to sustain a community.
I agree it doesn't need to be very popular to survive. But popularity is a measure of the actual benefit a language brings or, at least, lack of popularity is a measure of lack of sufficient benefit, because software is a competitive business. So claims that Rust is some huge game-changer don't really square with its rate of adoption.
