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An Anonymous Coward writes:

In some ways, C and C++ run the world. You'd never know it from all the hype about other programming languages, such as Python and Go, but the vast majority of high-performance mass-market desktop applications and operating systems are written in C++, and the vast majority of embedded applications are written in C. We're not talking about smartphone apps or web applications: these have special languages, such as Java and Kotlin for Android and Objective-C and Swift for iOS. They only use C/C++ for inner loops that have a crying need for speed, and for libraries shared across operating systems.

C and C++ have dominated systems programming for so long, it's difficult to imagine them being displaced. Yet many experts are saying it is time for them to go, and for programmers to embrace better alternatives. Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich recently made waves when he suggested that C and C++ developers should move to Rust instead. "The industry should declare those languages as deprecated," Russinovich tweeted.

Many developers are exploring Rust as a production-ready alternative to C/C++, and there are other options on the horizon. In this article, we'll consider the merits and readiness of the three most cited C/C++ language alternatives: Rust, Carbon, and cppfront. First, let's take a look back through the history and some of the pain points of C/C++.

[...] The Rust-lang homepage declares three major reasons to choose Rust: performance, reliability, and productivity. Rust was designed to be fast, safe, and easy to use, with the overarching goal of empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

As far as performance goes, Rust is both fast and memory-efficient: with no runtime or garbage collector, it can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and easily integrate with other languages. On the reliability side, Rust's rich type system and ownership model guarantee memory safety and thread safety—which developers can use to eliminate many classes of bugs at compile-time. For productivity, Rust boasts great documentation, a friendly compiler with useful error messages, and top-notch tooling—an integrated package manager and build tool, smart multi-editor support with auto-completion and type inspections, an auto-formatter, and more.

[...] The stated goals of the Carbon language project are: performance-critical software; software and language evolution; code that is easy to read, understand, and write; practical safety and testing mechanisms; fast and scalable development; modern OS platforms, hardware architectures, and environments; and interoperability with and migration from existing C++ code.

[...] Herb Sutter has served for a decade as chair of the ISO C++ standards committee. He is a software architect at Microsoft, where he's led the language extensions design of C++/CLI, C++/CX, C++ AMP, and other technologies. With Cpp2 and cppfront, Sutter says his "goal is to explore whether there's a way we can evolve C++ itself to become 10 times simpler, safer, and more toolable." He explains:

If we had an alternate C++ syntax, it would give us a "bubble of new code that doesn't exist today" where we could make arbitrary improvements (e.g., change defaults, remove unsafe parts, make the language context-free and order-independent, and generally apply 30 years' worth of learnings), free of backward source compatibility constraints.

[...] Rust, Carbon, and Cppfront all show promise as C++ alternatives. For Carbon, we're probably looking at a five-year development cycle until it's released for production. Cppfront might be available for production sooner, and Rust is already there.

All three languages are (or will be) interoperable with C++ at a binary level. That implies that all three languages could allow you to make gradual improvements to existing C++ programs by adding new non-C++ modules.

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