You are being a bit blinkered by your prejudices.
If you say so. We are all expressing our own opinions here. I'm not claiming that I hold the Truth.
My only prejudice though here, I think, is my initial reaction of considering Rust as "yet another me too wannabe". Sure it's a prejudice, not denying, but based on experience. We'll talk about it in 10 years from now if we are still around, I won't have a problem with being proven wrong.
Smalltalk was highly influential, and is embedded in several complex HP and Tektronix instruments.
Smalltalk's initial design actually predated C, and had pretty different objectives IMO, so it doesn't fall into the categories I was mentioning whatsoever (I was absolutely not saying that NO other language than C and C++ was worth considering!) But yes it has been highly influential, as many other languages of that era.
As to being used, that's a very small niche you're talking about.
Objective-C has also been rather successful, and is only recently being overtaken by Swift.
AFAIK, only Apple made it successful, and it's already declining now. Still the epitome of a niche. I actually found Objective-C better designed than C++, so this could have been one I had been happy to see taking over at least C++.
As to being used, that's still a niche we're talking about, and it's probably going to disappear completely once everything has migrated to Swift. Or something else.
Java has taken off and succeeded extremely well in areas where C++ tried and failed dismally. OTOH, Java failed in the embedded arena.
To me, JAVA is a disgrace for many reasons that would be too long to expose here. It has succeeded in some areas, I agree. That's the only serious example of a replacement here. I just don't think it has been a sane one, but that's another story. It worked. So whatever we think of the language, there are probably key ideas in it and in the way it was promoted that need to be considered to partially answer my last question.
As for languages with a standard, C/C++ is extremely good: there are so many different C/C++ standards to choose from.
It's the only guarantee to me that the tools will be correctly designed and do what they are supposed to. Yes standards are evolving, so? Does that make them irrelevant? I don't think so. Incidentally, the major languages that are still in common use today in safety-critical applications, such as C and ADA, are standardized. Call me when Java, Smalltalk or Objective-C (or now Rust) is used in such applications. (And I hope Boeing is not taking this as a hint
)
Again, as I said above, that's my own view and criterion. If you don't care or even think standards are counter-productive, good for you. To each his own.
As for whether Rust will succeed, only time will tell. It does have some beguiling core principles that avoid the frequent problems with C/C++, but it doesn't (yet) have the ctitical mass.
Of course only time will tell. Again, I'm just pointing out the absurd number of previous attempts all wishing the same thing, all having core features supposed to avoid the frequent problems with C and C++.
And I'm not bashing the idea of attempting to do so per se, I'm just convinced they all have been missing some critical points that I'm not completely sure about at this point (if I were, I may make such an attempt myself
), and, again, I do think this goes beyond the mere force of habit or huge code bases, even though those obviously count.
Not willing to rain on Rust's parade. I just haven't detected anything in Rust that would really separate it from the previous attempts, but I'd be interested in hearing which features exactly could make it different, and in which areas specifically.
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