[moltonel3x]

Different metrics tell a different story. For example GitHub pull requests [1] are C++: 2.60%, Rust: 2.09%, C: 1.43%, with a clear trend showing Rust ahead of C++ next year. Or you could look at the Stackoverflow survey of languages used among professionals [2], which gives C++: 20.17%, C: 16.7%, Rust: 8.8%, with rust gaining 1-2% each year.

There's no best metric, they're all biased, you need to consider a few different ones. Otherwise you won't notice when you've stumbled upon one with with an extreme view.

Combining C and C++ in language stats is debatable, they should IMHO be measured separately. When grouped as a language category, "C/C++/Rust" is slowly becoming more common.

1: https://tjpalmer.github.io/languish/#y=pulls&names=c%2B%2B%2...

2: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog...

[cobalt]

I assume 1 is pulling only from github.com public projects. Many companies A: don't make their code public, B: probably use github enterprise/other hosted solutions (esp including not git based)

2: Also skews towards a certain demographic

[moltonel3x]

Yes, public github repos, stackoverflow survey respondents, devjobscanner offers, google searches, etc are all skewed in some way.

It's very hard to qualify the effect of those biases though: for example how does the public/private repo ratio differ between languages ? Good luck giving a trustworthy answer to that. Apart from looking at lots of different source kinds, one thing that's fairly trustworthy is the trend of a specific language in a specific source.

On that topic, looking at the "SO questions" metric of the first link, C and C++ both have a strange regular spike in the last quarter of each year. I attribute that to new CS students flocking to SO at the beginning of their term. Another fun trend to look at is the hourly google searches over a week: the weekdays / workhours spike is much more pronounced for some languages than others.