>> Rust is far more widely used than D in the industry
An off the cuff comment but all the same it made me think - how would you get data for an assertion like that. The usage of both D and Rust is notoriously low in the industry, a rounding error. That has to make it so hard to measure. Still, you'd expect D to be more popular because Rust's only been around 10-ish years or so.
If you click through the TIOBE rankings, it lists them right next to each other on page 3 of the results behind other languages i can't help but be sceptical of like SAS, Prolog, Scratch and Visual Fox Pro.
Indeed claims 5k job listings for "D Programming Language" (i call foul, that seems way too high) and 2k for rust.
> The usage of both D and Rust is notoriously low in the industry
Rust usage is not "notoriously low" (don't know how you came to believe that) and it's growing very rapidly. The fact that it's a major supported language at Meta is evidence enough to the contrary, not to mention the plethora of post titles on HN that end with "in Rust", or are about rewriting in Rust (some of these are personal projects but many are company blog posts). I haven't seen any for D. Also just looked at the 2022 June Who's Hiring thread and ctrl-f "rust" found 23 matches, though admittedly that doesn't mean there are 23 jobs using Rust there.
I wouldn't trust Indeed, personally I've found it to be pretty bad for programming jobs, and definitely not representative of the industry (especially estimated salary, it's been wildly off for every company I've been at).
I just tried searching for a few language popularity studies, any that I found did not even include D. The StackOverflow 2022 dev survey says that Rust is both the most loved and wanted language: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and...
Rusts usage in industry absolutely is notoriously low when in comparison to C++ though (as is D’s) That’s changing of course but HN’s bubble is just that, a bubble.
My issue was with lumping in Rust with D when saying they both have "notoriously low usage" when Rust has, conservatively, probably >10x the usage of D.
You've said many wrong things on this thread, but the most egregious is quoting TIOBE like is has any meaning whatsoever. It's exclusively meant for managers who have no technical chops.
Do you even know what TIOBE measures? Not usage, not sentiment, not search trends. It measures the number of search results that a term returns. So any change to Google's algorithm changes the ranking of a programming language. If Google starts returning coffee results for "Java" that will boost it's TIOBE ranking.
Let me give you a few examples of how dumb TIOBE is.
1. You know what's the most popular language by any metric - jobs, Github repos/PRs, stackoverflow stars, survey results? Yeah, JavaScript. You know what TIOBE ranks higher than JS? Visual Basic.
2. Next, you know the entire iOS ecosystem that supports tens of thousands of devs and the billions of dollars in app revenue? All of it is written in Swift and Obj-C. You know what's ranked higher than those two? Assembly Language.
3. You know what almost all new web frontend codebases are written in now? TypeScript. In a few years it'll be the #1 language in the world once it supplants JS. You know it's TIOBE rank? #37, below Scratch, Prolog, Object Pascal.
But no, perhaps your confident assertion that Mozilla doesn't use Rust beats this TIOBE nonsense.
Rust has been adopted by Mozilla (of course), Microsoft, Meta, Google/Acrobat, Amazon, and even Apple for key infrastructure, among tons of others major big players.
Mozilla is a c++ and javascript shop. What do they ship in Rust? How much of Firefox is written in rust for example?
>> Microsoft, Meta, Google/Acrobat, Amazon
Large firms have lots of devs and consequently lots of toy projects. Is their usage of rust more significant than their use of D? I mean Meta was churning out projects in D a while back (warp, flint, etc) and looked like it might be going all in at one point (they even hired one of the leads on D lang).
>Mozilla is a c++ and javascript shop. What do they ship in Rust? How much of Firefox is written in rust for example?
Mozilla created the Rust project and funded the language's creation and several years of maturity. They replaced a large chunk of the layout engine with a Rust version.
>Large firms have lots of devs and consequently lots of toy projects.
Yes. But they don't tout the languages they use in those toy projects in their official communications, help create the language foundation, support the language with devs, or build their critical infrastructure or new in-house mobile OS in those toy languages.
Here's an example from Amazon:
"At AWS, Rust has quickly become critical to building infrastructure at scale. Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that powers AWS Lambda and other serverless offerings. It launched publicly in 2018 as our first notable product implemented in Rust. We use Rust to deliver services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon CloudFront, and more. In 2020, we launched Bottlerocket, a Linux-based container operating system written in Rust, and our Amazon EC2 team uses Rust as the language of choice for new AWS Nitro System components, including sensitive applications, such as Nitro Enclaves.
At AWS, we believe leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than they found them. In 2019, AWS was proud to become a sponsor of the Rust project. In 2020, we started hiring Rust maintainers and contributors, and we partnered with Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla to create the Rust Foundation with a mission to support Rust. AWS is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions."
Re: Go, it's use cases overlap with the officially supported languages, so there's no broad need for it.