Slide with text: “Rust teams at Google are as productive as ones using Go, and more than twice as productive as teams using C++.”
In small print it says the data is collected over 2022 and 2023.
Slide with text: “Rust teams at Google are as productive as ones using Go, and more than twice as productive as teams using C++.”
In small print it says the data is collected over 2022 and 2023.
I was a lot more productive in C++ 15 years ago when the current project was 100% greenfield. Now that the code is 15 years old I’m much less productive because over the years we have discovered mistakes we made. I suspect I’m still more productive than the average C++ programmer because 15 years ago modern C++ was known (c++11 was still a couple years away though) and so we didn’t do a lot of the mess that people hate on C++ for.
Which is to say I want to know how productive those programmers will be in 15 years when the shiny of rust has warn off and they are looking at years of what seemed like a good design but current requirements just don’t fit.
I suspect a large part of that will depend on how well Rust keeps the feature creep in check. C++ was a bit of a language design magpie. Pretty much any language design idea anyone had ever got pulled into the language and it turned into a real mess. Many of those features are incompatible with each other as well, so once you use one feature, you’re no longer able to use one of the competing ones, which has lead to partial fragmentation of the ecosystem (interestingly enough D who set out to be a “better” C++, also ran into a similar but far worse situation). Many of those features have also been found to be problematic in various ways and have fallen out of favor recently and so are viewed as warts on the language, or failed experiments.
Rust is still young, so there aren’t very many competing features, and none that I’m aware of that are considered things to avoid. If it can manage to keep it’s feature set under control by actively deprecating and removing features that are problematic, and being more judicious than C++ was in pulling in new ones it should be able to avoid the same fate as C++. Time will tell I suppose.
I feel like I work well even without the
new C++ featuressmart pointer stuff, simply because: