[saghm]

> Which brings up a more interesting argument IMO: platform fragmentation. Rust has approximately 1.5 advantages over C/C++. To displace them in a reasonable time, it probably needed 4 or 5. Its most significant contribution for the foreseeable future is platform fragmentation.

I'm honestly not sure what any of this means. How are you counting "advantages", and how did you come up with the requisite number being 4 or 5? It's not clear to me why all advantages would be equal in magnitude. Maybe this is what you intended to convey by not using whole numbers, although it seems like trying to estimate how advantages compare like this in a way that was precise enough to be informative would be difficult, to say the least.

To be clear, I don't disagree with you that C/C++ are not in any immediate risk of being displaced (and I'd go further and argue that C and C++ are distinct enough in how they're used that displacing one wouldn't necessarily imply displacing the other as well). I just don't think I've ever seen things quantified in this way before, and it's confusing enough to me that I don't want to discount the possibility that I'm misunderstanding something.

[damon_dam]

> How are you counting "advantages", and how did you come up with the requisite number being 4 or 5?

The vagueness was intentional. There is of course no homogeneous way of combining advantages into a cardinal measure. It's just a rhetorical device.

The point is that it falls short of the amount needed. Another, more subtle point is that I didn't count disadvantages. The argument applies even if you think Rust doesn't have any.