I read all these posts on Rust and it makes me wonder if I'm being stupid spending time on C++? I want a language that I can focus on for the foreseeable part of my career. I'm looking for stability and am interested in domains like finance and robotics. My key wants are that I can deep dive a language for as long as possible, as I'm burning out from constantly changing languages after ~8 years. I need some sort of external validation before I jump on five different things and fail lol.
You can still make a living as a COBOL programmer even though it has (hopefully!) been a very long time since any new project was started with COBOL. There is enough C++ around that you'll have no trouble finding a job as C++ programmer for next couple of decades at least.
Even if there is no new C++ project ever, there is tons and tons of legacy products that needs to be maintained (they are not all going to be rewritten, just as the old cobol projects aren't) and C++ is a deep language that really could benefit from extreme knowledge (a const rvalue reference? wtf).
Rust may fail, but it is probably worth learning some of the ideas - maybe you could use those ideas in your C++ projects?
Oh I've spent years working with Haskell and work with Rust right now! And I absolutely love diving into the pros of awesome type systems. I've actually worked with Golang, F#, Scala, Typescript, Java, C#, C++, Python, and probably a few others (all professionally, as in I've shipped something to prod) over the last few years.
I used to love this but now I'm getting burned out with it all and want to learn a language in more depth.
If you pick any language which is non-esoteric today (C, C++, Python, JavaScript, Java), you should do fine for the next 20 years.
If you want to make a bet on a language which isn’t supper big yet, but might be in the future, than Rust is definitely the way to go. It’s already big enough that it’s clear that it isn’t going away, but it is still growing pretty fast. It might or might not end up as big as C++.
