Re: The Case for Rust (in the base system)

On 2024年09月04日 08:43, the silly David Chisnall claimed to have said:
> On 4 Sep 2024, at 07:35, lain. <lain@fair.moe> wrote:
> > 
> > About C developers being in decline, I actually disagree with that.
> > I have seen younger generations getting interested in C the more they
> > get overwhelmed by the amount of new languages to chose from.
> 
> This does not reflect my experience in hiring, the data I’ve seen from a major tech company, or the trends in open source contributions.
> 
> It is far easier to hire C++ developers than C developers. This shift started a bit after C++11 was released and has continued. 
> 
> This trend is reflected in open source. Here is the OpenHub graph:
> 
> https://openhub.net/languages/compare?utf8=%E2%9C%93&measure=contributors&language_name%255B%255D=c&language_name%255B%255D=cpp&language_name%255B%255D=-1&language_name%255B%255D=-1&language_name%255B%255D=-1&commit=Update
> 
> This shows the number of open source contributors making contributions in C or C++ over the past decade. You’ll see that there are now more than three times as many C++ developers as C contributing to open source projects (I’m ignoring the last few months where it looks as if C programmers all gave up and went home, I presume there’s an error in the underlying data).
> 
> For Rust, the situation is more complicated. Hiring good Rust developers is harder than hiring C developers (there are no Rust developers with ten years experience because the language isn’t that old, and even though a lot of people are learning it, there’s a lot of inertia). This changes a lot when you look at the open source ecosystem because the fact that Rust is new and came from the open-source world skews the people who learn it towards open source and towards wanting to practice the language that they’ve learned. Here’s the same graph with Rust added:
> 
> https://openhub.net/languages/compare?utf8=%E2%9C%93&measure=contributors&language_name%255B%255D=c&language_name%255B%255D=cpp&language_name%255B%255D=rust&language_name%255B%255D=-1&commit=Update
> 
> Note that there are still fewer Rust developers than C, but they’re increasing and they tend to be more enthusiastic contributors.
> 
> David

When looking at recruitment alone, I'm aware that nobody wants to learn
something companies don't hire, and in return, nobody wants to hire
something nobody is learning.
It's an infinite feedback loop.

When looking at Github repositories alone, C declining would be correct.
However, Github is not the only Git hosting platform, and C might be
more thriving on other platforms.

My observation is that C developers today are either "dissidents"
against modern languages, or lone wolf programmers, or developers going
their own way (DGTOW?), or homebrew developers for retro consoles, or
Unix greybeards, or people doing embedded programming for a living.

There is data, and so there is nuance.

-- 
lain.
PGP public key: https://fair.moe/lain.asc