I would have had much less interest in Rust as a peanut gallery participant if it didn’t have that goal of competing with C++. Not because I am a C++ or C programmer myself, but because it has been interesting to see if alternatives to such well-established languages can in fact be successful.
Think about it: we have dozens upon dozens of Hoare-esque “sacrifice some performance for ergonomics” languages out there. But what are you gonna do when you need performance that the language is too inflexible for? Hmm... perhaps write some of your app in C...?
If it weren’t for Rust and similar languages, we would never have a hope of moving on to more modern languages for those “can’t do this in my $mainlang due to performance” problems. How would yet another language that (according to Hoare):
> and I would have traded lots and lots of small constant performancee costs for simpler or more robust versions of many abstractions.
have helped with that? It wouldn’t! You would have still been stuck with having to bind to C, C++, assembly, or whatever else sufficiently “zero-cost abstraction” language.
Think about it: we have dozens upon dozens of Hoare-esque “sacrifice some performance for ergonomics” languages out there. But what are you gonna do when you need performance that the language is too inflexible for? Hmm... perhaps write some of your app in C...?
If it weren’t for Rust and similar languages, we would never have a hope of moving on to more modern languages for those “can’t do this in my $mainlang due to performance” problems. How would yet another language that (according to Hoare):
> and I would have traded lots and lots of small constant performancee costs for simpler or more robust versions of many abstractions.
have helped with that? It wouldn’t! You would have still been stuck with having to bind to C, C++, assembly, or whatever else sufficiently “zero-cost abstraction” language.