While I agree with the huge adoption improvements, there is also a dose of reality check required.
There are several domains where C++ never managed to displace C, and likewise the same seems bound to happen with Rust towards C and C++, regardless of safety improvements.
Khronos API definitions, the whole GPGPU ecosystem including vendor tooling, all major runtimes and compiler frameworks, consoles devkits, are few domains where Rust has yet to have a presence.
Rust seems tailor made for a compiler framework. The issue is how often do new ones come along?
In 40 years, we have GCC and LLvM. How long until something comes along to displace them in any language? Nobody is really trying to “rewrite it in Rust” the LLVM platform (even though Rust itself relies on it). There is Cranelift of course but it is not really trying to be LLVM.
Sort of. Last time I looked, about a year ago, there were a bunch and all of the ones I looked at/tried seemed really awkward to use. I don’t love Qt either, but in C++ land it’s a pretty reliable way to slap together a simple UI that doesn’t require a whole lot of ceremony.
Global mutable state is difficult to handle correctly and Rust forces you to think through the consequences. There's no shortage of patterns for safely working with it, but you can't take the easy (and unsafe!) way out.
Not really, there’s two models that work. The react model and the immediate model. The whole class inherits widget hellscape is not, no loss there. That route inevitably leads to bugs that are hard to find and fix because of all the weird state buried in inherited types.
I really like egui. People talk about it not being professional because it is raster graphics and doesn't have native widgets, but neither of those things are anywhere on my customer's priority list.
> The demands for memory safety are not unreasonable, in fact, I consider them too feeble for the long term, so responding to the demands is in the interest of C++
> The sky isn’t falling, but unless we act now and get C++ onto a track supporting a flexible framework of profiles (supporting various forms of safety), we risk a painful decline.
He's simply making the case for profiles and trying to rally the people he works with around that as a necessary goal. That's something that any leadership has to do from time to time. That's also something he's done before when he warned everyone about proposing a bunch of incompatible features with no clear vision. Nothing unexpected here, in no way is this "panicking".
Between this and Bjarne Stroustrup panic leaked email to C++ standards committee members, it's going to be interesting for Rust's future.