Sure they do. But when you say "gurus" and "magicians" these are people who have spent decades with the language and are awesome at it. It's possible that Rust may improve their lives, but it would take years before they have that same level of proficiency. Not because Rust is hard, but because they are so good at C++ and getting that good in anything is hard.
Rust does market to C/++ people, a lot. We just don't market to the super-awesome C++ folks. It's the same reason I preferred Word 2003 over the new stuff for half a decade. I had years of memorized shortcuts, custom macros, and general ui familiarity. I could eventually learn the shiny new Word and become as good, but the activation energy for that is too much and I was happy with 2003.
Rust isn't only going after non-systems folks. The community is roughly half systemsy. But it may seem this way because Rust tries very hard to not alienate non-systems people with jargon and unexplained systems concepts.
A developer evangelist. Think someone doing a talk about new Java 9 features at a Java conference.
C++ gurus and C magicians already have invested too deep into their languages to throw everything away and start from zero.
For example I love Rust and play occasionally with it, but for the time being C++ is my native language on the job when I need to use a native language outside .NET or JVM.
I know it since the C++ARM "standard" and we depend on standard OS tooling that Rust is still catching up with.
The day will come when our customers will be able to do mixed debugging between JVM/.NET and Rust. Or produce COM as easy as C++ compilers do.
But these are things that beginners in systems programming aren't usually doing.
As a C magician, rust provides too many clear improvements over C to ignore it. I certainly don't feel like I am 'throwing everything away and starting from zero,' as much of my C (and other language) knowledge transfers over to rust.
I'm not a C++ guru, but I think modern C++ is powerful enough that it doesn't feel lacking in features compared to rust, like C does. There is less of a draw for seasoned C++ programmers.
Rust seems to be gaining a lot of momentum and I am becoming more and more confident that it will be regarded as a major language for embedded and general systems programming and possibly even a successor to C.
Developer marketing: marketing to developers. Marketing gets a bad reputation among developers, but it's vital for any technology to be marketed: keeping documentation up to date, answering questions for newcomers, explaining strengths/weaknesses, etc.
>Don't they have anything to gain from using Rust?
They might have something to gain, but they're probably deeply invested in the tech already.
People are very hard to dislodge from such positions, unless the new positions have overwhelming benefits such as: a new environment does not support the old tools/programming language; a radical paradigm shift has happened that risks to make completely obsolete their previous knowledge, etc.
Rust is more of an incremental improvement over C++, than a radical leap forward. So C++ magicians are less likely to want to switch over.
I still use 'C'. I do this primarily because the legacy code base is staggeringly large. I'd jump on a gig doing Rust in a heartbeat, all other factors to the good.
> Don't they have anything to gain from using Rust?
Sure they do, but they're not throwing away a decade of hard-won experience in their specialties just to tinker; at least not with production code bases. The barrier of entry for beginner systems programmers is lower.
As a C++ enthusiast, I wouldn't use the words "throw knowledge". All the concepts you can find in Rust are almost matching one to one to a C++14 equivalent (albeit pattern matching for instance). The difference being the enforcement of these good practices by the compiler. It would most likely take me 2 days to read the latest rust doc and 1 month of practice to be proficient.
Thing is, it's a bit like switching from Python 2 to Python 3. Why would I move to this new environment where I would need to recode everything from scratch? Python 3 will take decades to overthrow its predecessor, how long will it be for Rust? Will it ever succeed? Will the C++ committee react and borrow some of Rust awesomeness? Can I find co-workers willing to learn Rust?
Someone who markets to developers. The language and context should clear up the ambiguity that they don't mean they are merely a developer that works in marketing for something like, say selling potato chips
Rust does market to C/++ people, a lot. We just don't market to the super-awesome C++ folks. It's the same reason I preferred Word 2003 over the new stuff for half a decade. I had years of memorized shortcuts, custom macros, and general ui familiarity. I could eventually learn the shiny new Word and become as good, but the activation energy for that is too much and I was happy with 2003.
Rust isn't only going after non-systems folks. The community is roughly half systemsy. But it may seem this way because Rust tries very hard to not alienate non-systems people with jargon and unexplained systems concepts.