TBH Garbage collectors aren’t really the issue. There are plenty of Java/C#/Go apps that feel super snappy and have a relatively small memory footprint. Dynamic typing is a much bigger factor in performance than GCs. The issue is also that now everything needs to happen in the browser, because it’s the only “true” cross-platform solution for the moment. So lazy devs prefer running a full Chromium instance than using a native framework.
Also the reason is that since JS is the first language of a lot of devs (because in runs in the Web, and the NPM ecosystem is one of the easiest to get into) JS devs are cheap. On the other hand, other languages are much harder to get into.
Golang was created to be able to rival JS in terms of ease to get into, so it is gaining a lot of traction for backend stuff. However it doesn’t really have good ways to do GUIs, so for apps we may have to wait.
I don’t think one minute that Rust will ever become a mainstream language for writing GUI apps outside of specific cases where performance is primordial (browsers for example) because it is way too hard to get into and that means high costs of training/salaries.
However I completely believe that in the long terrm, Rust has the potential to completely replace C/C++. It’s actually easier to learn, easier to use, and its main feature (safety) will save companies a TON of money that would otherwise be spent debugging/dealing with bugs in production (including security issues). There are a few rough edges to fix, but we will get there (embedded targets, behing standardized and having other compilers that the official one).
TBH Garbage collectors aren’t really the issue. There are plenty of Java/C#/Go apps that feel super snappy and have a relatively small memory footprint. Dynamic typing is a much bigger factor in performance than GCs. The issue is also that now everything needs to happen in the browser, because it’s the only “true” cross-platform solution for the moment. So lazy devs prefer running a full Chromium instance than using a native framework.
Also the reason is that since JS is the first language of a lot of devs (because in runs in the Web, and the NPM ecosystem is one of the easiest to get into) JS devs are cheap. On the other hand, other languages are much harder to get into.
Golang was created to be able to rival JS in terms of ease to get into, so it is gaining a lot of traction for backend stuff. However it doesn’t really have good ways to do GUIs, so for apps we may have to wait.
I don’t think one minute that Rust will ever become a mainstream language for writing GUI apps outside of specific cases where performance is primordial (browsers for example) because it is way too hard to get into and that means high costs of training/salaries.
However I completely believe that in the long terrm, Rust has the potential to completely replace C/C++. It’s actually easier to learn, easier to use, and its main feature (safety) will save companies a TON of money that would otherwise be spent debugging/dealing with bugs in production (including security issues). There are a few rough edges to fix, but we will get there (embedded targets, behing standardized and having other compilers that the official one).