The issue that caused this to be voted down is often seen as a memory safety solution (not something I personally 100% agree with, but thats a broad view). And the rest of this release includes other memory safety work. And it was voted down and delayed for apparent political reasons (again not a view I agree with).

So most people will read your view as hypocritical/misinformed.

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Memory safety was solved in 1959 with the invention of lisp

you know downvoting without explaining why is part of herd mentality. i expected better on HN. dont you wanna give some reasons as to why you find this offensive?

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Perhaps it is, in this case it would be between money and everyone else specifically. Contracts is a pet project of Microsoft and the heavy money parts of the committee. They've basically shouted down the dissenters, hence the effectively unprecedented action of the rubberstamp portion of the process saying they dont think consensus was reached in a kosher way.

Even if C++ is irrelevant for new code, there's so much software already written in it that we'll be maintaining it for decades to come. I'd argue that Cobol and Fortran have been mostly obsolete for new code for almost 30 years now, yet both are still widely used today, and they've even had major updates in the past decade [0] [1]. And there's even more software written in C++ than there is in Cobol or Fortran, so I don't think that C++ is going away any time soon.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#COBOL_2023

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Fortran_2023

Essentially all high-end systems code for high-performance and high-reliability systems is still written in modern C++. That language has many attractive properties, including safety features that Rust does not currently support.

Additionally, for pure performance requirements, C++ is still materially faster than Rust in practice. That may change some day. C++ has many issues but it is also objectively excellent at many things.

Your Rust very likely runs in a C / C++ environment.

C++ is the third most popular programming language according to TIOBE behind C and python. It's got an 8.87% ranking. So yes it looks like C++ is still relevant. In fact C++ usage has risen slightly.

Rust is in tenth place with 1.44% ranking, it's rising fast but still has a long way to go before it catches C++.

I'm not going to speculate about why Rust hasn't yet supplanted C++ but I will say I don't find it surprising.

99.9% of all system code in the world is still written in C/++. It runs your Java, C#, Javascript, Python, PHP, basically every production language that isn't Go or Rust. It runs the two most popular game engines in the world. It runs your phone, server, and laptop, no matter which of any you use. It runs your car. It runs almost every embedded and industrial application on the planet.

Is it still relevant, JFC. The way people on this forum manage to sequester themselves from reality. Let me reverse the question: is Rust relevant? Mozilla developed Rust, abandoned their Rust browser, and only 10% of Firefox is written in Rust. Maybe 1% of modules in Chrome and Linux are written in Rust, if that. And what of Rust applications written from scratch? Can you name ten applications that have, say, exposure to more than 100,000 users? Impossible mode: they can't be developer tools only used by other developers (uv, ripgrep, etc.), they must actually be applications used by enterprises or consumers.

> So it's time to rethink.

>

> And we have no idea what AI systems will be doing in 2027.

How would you begin to form a plan of how you'll rethink if you can't even see into next year? Isn't it beneficial not to change the languages too much because there's so much training data for the current revisions? AI does not need to be catered to, that is the whole point and why it is useful.

Not to defend the particular proposal at issue here, but my sense is that contract-like things synergize quite well with AI coding, for the same reasons automated tests and static types do.

A lot of folks, many of them our most capable programmers, are fighting the last war. It’s like they think AI is going away and we’ll all work like it’s 2019 again.