Do you play games? Do you play console games, or desktop games? Do these games support 3D rendering? Soft shadows? Physically based lights? Pathfinding of crowds of people or units? Literally hundreds of thousands of projectiles? Networked replication? Leverage all the cores of your desktop/device/console while doing the above? Support unique or specialized data structures? Execute a runtime that CAN'T tolerate non-deterministic GC pauses?
I make games. What am I supposed to code that in? Fucking javascript? Ruby? C#? Go stfu and die yourself. If you want to come up with a language that can get the job fucking done than by all means, go for it and fail miserably. Otherwise, stop using any of the products that leverage C++. We don't want you.
Hopefully Rust will take a chunk out of this market, but I agree that folks don't seem to realize how important systems programming is in supporting their higher level languages.
I hear that not all development is web development. In fact, those in the know know that even very popular well-known companies that make their profits from web applications heavily leverage C, C++, and tools (and languages) that are themselves built with C and/or C++ or run in embedded or VM processes that are themselves built with C and/or C++.
I find it amusing that the new languages being heavily touted in the non-functional space (that would be Go, D and Rust) are all using C and C++ as their targets for replacement. Everybody loves to hate C and C++, yet the tech world literally runs on them, and will for the foreseeable future.
This isn't to say there isn't anything better, or that they'll never be replaced.
What would you suggest instead? Until there is something that is as general purpose as C++ and has the same level of performance it will continue to survive.
Maybe in 4 or 5 years, if things go well. There hasn't even been a 1.0 release yet. That's the bare minimum necessary for a lot of existing C++ users to even consider Rust as a potentially viable option.
Assuming Rust 1.0 is released sometime this year, it'll still take a number of years before Rust even begins to offer the very wide range of libraries/frameworks that are available to C++ developers.
Interfacing with these existing C++ libraries/frameworks may speed things up, but at that point its disputable whether it's really Rust being used.
Rust may be among the most promising alternatives, but it's just not there yet, and won't be for some time.
Stop using this bastard of a language. Its an offront to software engineering and must simply die