[belval]

It seems likely that the overwhelming majority of those 1000 people are pushing it into organizational adoption. Rust is not used enough yet that anyone will be forced to use it. Older C++ programmers at Google who are uninterested in moving aren't doing Rust.

As a parallel. A team using Scala at Amazon likely uses it because everyone (let's say 90%) was on board. It's just not something you force on your team unless there is existing interest.

Finally (an perhaps more importantly), the parent comment also mentioned older codebases. It does not seem likely anyone of those 1000 is currently doing maintenance so much as completely new projects/features. This tends to be work software developers enjoy more irrespective of language. So if you were pulled from maintenance in C++ to work on something new in Rust I'm pretty sure you'll say Rust is great just because you feel more productive.

[steveklabnik]

> Rust is not used enough yet that anyone will be forced to use it.

Google hired Ferrous Systems to train employees, as well as writing their own training curriculum. That sounds to me like people who would not otherwise use Rust being asked to use it at their job, and their job investing in their skills because they wouldn't or hadn't done it on their own. Is that different than "forced to use it"?

> It does not seem likely anyone of those 1000 is currently doing maintenance so much as completely new projects/features.

Google has been using Rust in android since 2019. That's four years. That is of course not "legacy" in any large sense, but at what point for you is something legacy? Does none of that work over four years count as "maintenance"?

> So if you were pulled from maintenance in C++ to work on something new in Rust I'm pretty sure you'll say Rust is great just because you feel more productive.

The start of this sub-thread, and a lot of the discussion inside of it, implies that people are using Rust simply because they want to, and not because it provides actual advantages. Is your position here that the sole advantage of Rust over C++ is that since projects are newer, they're better to work on? And if so, is that advantage illegitimate?

[belval]

The first two points I don't really have anything to add on.

> Is your position here that the sole advantage of Rust over C++ is that since projects are newer, they're better to work on? And if so, is that advantage illegitimate?

No, to rephrase, I think that maintenance work on average feels less productive and more grueling because you can spend 3 days debugging for a single line change. With a new project (or any new feature) you get to write your own thing which feels more productive.

I'm not saying people are less productive with Rust than C++. I am pointing out that there is a natural bias in the type of work that those two languages are being used for at Google and that this bias will impact self-assessed productivity.

> Does none of that work over four years count as "maintenance"?

Respectfully I think you are building a strawman because you (likely) work with Rust and enjoy it. Google is built on a staggering amount of 10-20 years old C++ codebases that have seen several runs of refactoring at this point and stand on the critical path of several of their most important products. Working on those is inherently slower and more meticulous than writing new Android features (even if 4 years old) in Rust.

[steveklabnik]

Thanks.