An off the cuff comment but all the same it made me think - how would you get data for an assertion like that. The usage of both D and Rust is notoriously low in the industry, a rounding error. That has to make it so hard to measure. Still, you'd expect D to be more popular because Rust's only been around 10-ish years or so.
If you click through the TIOBE rankings, it lists them right next to each other on page 3 of the results behind other languages i can't help but be sceptical of like SAS, Prolog, Scratch and Visual Fox Pro.
Indeed claims 5k job listings for "D Programming Language" (i call foul, that seems way too high) and 2k for rust.
Rust usage is not "notoriously low" (don't know how you came to believe that) and it's growing very rapidly. The fact that it's a major supported language at Meta is evidence enough to the contrary, not to mention the plethora of post titles on HN that end with "in Rust", or are about rewriting in Rust (some of these are personal projects but many are company blog posts). I haven't seen any for D. Also just looked at the 2022 June Who's Hiring thread and ctrl-f "rust" found 23 matches, though admittedly that doesn't mean there are 23 jobs using Rust there.
I wouldn't trust Indeed, personally I've found it to be pretty bad for programming jobs, and definitely not representative of the industry (especially estimated salary, it's been wildly off for every company I've been at).
I just tried searching for a few language popularity studies, any that I found did not even include D. The StackOverflow 2022 dev survey says that Rust is both the most loved and wanted language: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and...
Hardly any job postings. No large projects on github. No halo project (does servo count? It’s not gone anywhere yet, is it still alive?).
There’s an echo chamber around the language.
Job postings that mention using Rust from July 2022 Who's Hiring thread alone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31948363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32070322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31949373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32015077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31947359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31969755 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31949096
> No large projects on github. No halo project
Take your pick: https://github.com/search?l=Rust&o=desc&q=rust&s=stars&type=... Deno has 84k stars.
Do you even know what TIOBE measures? Not usage, not sentiment, not search trends. It measures the number of search results that a term returns. So any change to Google's algorithm changes the ranking of a programming language. If Google starts returning coffee results for "Java" that will boost it's TIOBE ranking.
Let me give you a few examples of how dumb TIOBE is.
1. You know what's the most popular language by any metric - jobs, Github repos/PRs, stackoverflow stars, survey results? Yeah, JavaScript. You know what TIOBE ranks higher than JS? Visual Basic.
2. Next, you know the entire iOS ecosystem that supports tens of thousands of devs and the billions of dollars in app revenue? All of it is written in Swift and Obj-C. You know what's ranked higher than those two? Assembly Language.
3. You know what almost all new web frontend codebases are written in now? TypeScript. In a few years it'll be the #1 language in the world once it supplants JS. You know it's TIOBE rank? #37, below Scratch, Prolog, Object Pascal.
But no, perhaps your confident assertion that Mozilla doesn't use Rust beats this TIOBE nonsense.
That's practically all of FAANG and more.
D never had that.
Mozilla is a c++ and javascript shop. What do they ship in Rust? How much of Firefox is written in rust for example?
>> Microsoft, Meta, Google/Acrobat, Amazon
Large firms have lots of devs and consequently lots of toy projects. Is their usage of rust more significant than their use of D? I mean Meta was churning out projects in D a while back (warp, flint, etc) and looked like it might be going all in at one point (they even hired one of the leads on D lang).
>> That's practically all of FAANG
Who were we missing? Netflix, they’ve dabbled with D too: https://github.com/Netflix/vectorflow
Don’t misunderstand my point - it’s not that D is more popular than rust, it’s that rust is not used for real work in any significant capacity yet.
Where’s the big project written in rust? Servo and the rust compiler are the only two large rust projects on github.
About 20%, if you compare it directly against C and C++ and exclude Javascript, CSS, HTML, Java, etc.
https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_...
Mozilla created the Rust project and funded the language's creation and several years of maturity. They replaced a large chunk of the layout engine with a Rust version.
>Large firms have lots of devs and consequently lots of toy projects.
Yes. But they don't tout the languages they use in those toy projects in their official communications, help create the language foundation, support the language with devs, or build their critical infrastructure or new in-house mobile OS in those toy languages.
Here's an example from Amazon:
"At AWS, Rust has quickly become critical to building infrastructure at scale. Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that powers AWS Lambda and other serverless offerings. It launched publicly in 2018 as our first notable product implemented in Rust. We use Rust to deliver services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon CloudFront, and more. In 2020, we launched Bottlerocket, a Linux-based container operating system written in Rust, and our Amazon EC2 team uses Rust as the language of choice for new AWS Nitro System components, including sensitive applications, such as Nitro Enclaves.
At AWS, we believe leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than they found them. In 2019, AWS was proud to become a sponsor of the Rust project. In 2020, we started hiring Rust maintainers and contributors, and we partnered with Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla to create the Rust Foundation with a mission to support Rust. AWS is investing in the sustainability of Rust, a language we believe should be used to build sustainable and secure solutions."
And here are more:
https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2021/02/08/micro...
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/02/google-joins-rust-...
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-environment/rus...
https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/docs/+/d4f9b980f18fc6722b06...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/why-aws-loves-rust-a...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/sustainability-with-...
https://thenewstack.io/microsoft-rust-is-the-industrys-best-...
>Where’s the big project written in rust? Servo and the rust compiler are the only two large rust projects on github.
I don't think you'll find Google, Amazon, Dropbox, etc backend code in GitHub, if that's your metric.
