I'm very confused. Rust is mainstream? C, C++, Java, C#, Python, JavaScript are all what I would call mainstream. Rust is not a language that comes to mind at all.
Rust has hit the point where it's in the conversation for what language you'd write a new project in, even for big companies (typically the most lethargic). I'd say it's at the level of mainstream where there's Rust being written in a significant portion of the industry, but not at the level of mainstream where it's somewhere in the stack behind most of organised society
Pretty damn mainstream nowadays, yes. Quite a few big tech companies are either actively doing much of their new systems programming in Rust, or else dipping their toes in.
I honestly don't know of a big tech company that is happy with the idea of just continuing to use C++ indefinitely - they are _all_ looking for alternatives, and Rust is the most obvious option.
> Quite a few big tech companies are either actively doing much of their new systems programming in Rust, or else dipping their toes in
I don't think that's true. It seems to me that a lot of people believe this simply because a lot of other people believe it. You see it everywhere. "Oracle rewriting MySQL in Rust". "Microsoft rewrites Skype in Rust". "Linus Torvalds rewriting Linux in Rust". I have yet to see proof of any of it.
The Google team I work on (ChromeOS, crosvm[0] specifically) has been transitioning to Rust for a lot of our new services (mostly crosvm and stuff that interacts with it) and I couldn't be happier :)
The claim was "continuing to use C++ indefinitely." For that not to be true they'd have to be looking at replacing C++ entirely. Moving everything to rust/go/whatever. Do you foresee Google doing that?
Google as a company? Not necessarily, I don't have a crystal ball.
ChromeOS as a product? Maybe. (note: not Chrome)
ChromeOS platform internals? I totally could. You don't just rewrite everything from C++ to Rust, because that wouldn't make much sense, but more and more new service/products are being spun up that use Rust (we have docs and stuff https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/docs/+/master/r...).
More people pick up coding C++ professionally in any given week than the total being paid to code Rust full time.
The bigger a company is, the more various languages people there dabble in, and the less it means that somebody there dabbles in your favorite. You would better add up revenue (NB: not market cap) of companies specializing in using your favorite language; but that number would be disappointingly small for any language as far from maturity as Rust still is.
