> But most people in the industry I casually talk to -- who aren't a particular kind of open source or language nerd etc. -- have barely even heard of Rust. There's no way it's legacy.
While Rust is still too young to make C++ a legacy alone, the transition has been long underway. "Scripting" languages, managed language runtimes, and a popularity of web development has greatly reduced needs for C++. Nowadays no one writes a web server in C++ [1], not because it is not performant enough for its job, but because other languages are better suited to provide a tradeoff between development experience and performance. C++ will continue to have lots of niches for coming decades, but is already a legacy in many enough fields.
[1] Well, not really! First and foremost I have written a C++ web server as late as in 2016. But we needed a very good reason to do so, and any further logic was delegated to C#.
While Rust is still too young to make C++ a legacy alone, the transition has been long underway. "Scripting" languages, managed language runtimes, and a popularity of web development has greatly reduced needs for C++. Nowadays no one writes a web server in C++ [1], not because it is not performant enough for its job, but because other languages are better suited to provide a tradeoff between development experience and performance. C++ will continue to have lots of niches for coming decades, but is already a legacy in many enough fields.
[1] Well, not really! First and foremost I have written a C++ web server as late as in 2016. But we needed a very good reason to do so, and any further logic was delegated to C#.