Dumb question: How popular is C++ as a systems programming language in 2017? Does anyone have data on the popularity of various languages (C, Rust, Go, etc.) when web and application development are excluded?
"... Let's see Rust for what it is: the latest attempt at a C++ replacement. These have come and gone over the years, and it's by no means clear that Rust will succeed. As an example, Rust is currently 43rd of the 50 languages monitored in the Tiobe index. For comparison with languages of a similar vintage, Swift and Go are 10th and 17th respectively. C++ is 3rd. To put it bluntly: almost nobody is using Rust in the real world yet.
So please, ease up on the hype, Rust users. Have a little humility. You've got a nice little language with some really good ideas, and having a static analyser built into your compiler is cool. But there's a long way to go yet."[1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/611811/have_you_used_r...
However, I think that post from Reddit was a bit misleading in its own way. Go has been much more mature from the beginning, given its authors and origins, and in some ways had an easier target, in being a slower but simpler, safer version of C, or a faster version of Python (as far as new users of the language are concerned). It's also in many ways sort of a modern version of C, so very familiar to potential users. Finally, it had its 1.0 release in 2012.
Rust, in contrast, had less of a head start. It is newer in a lot of ways in terms of its characteristics and features, and had a more difficult target, at the lower level and with the performance characteristics of C++. Finally, its 1.0 release wasn't until [less than] 2 years ago, in 2015. Go has been post-1.0 for over twice as long as Rust, which is a significant length of time in IT.
I think some people define systems programming as "interacting with the OS all the time"; which is something that Go is really good at.
C++ = 22.3%
C = 19%
Swift = 6.5%
Go = 4.3%
Rust is not even on the list which means it's usage is less than 1.8%.
Golang might be #4 or so; there might be some projects that use Rust but not much; the raw C that comes to mind is from third party libraries like libpcap.
In case you're curious, a lot of our internal tooling for monitoring (to provide an example) uses Python.
https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/
This isn't exactly what you are looking for, but I think it still shows that C++ is fairly popular. C is second among systems languages at 19% and Go is near 4% (Rust is presumably less than 1.8% since it's not even on the list)
I believe that Rust has the power to take a significant part of C++ in coming years. Maybe that also Ada will increase due to the rise of public interest in code safety. C will remain as it is because there is no easier way to port system software to new platforms.
> GitHut is an attempt to visualize and explore the complexity of the universe of programming languages used across the repositories hosted on GitHub.
> Github is the largest code host in the world, with 3.4 million users. It's the place where the open-source development community offers access to most of its projects. By analyzing how languages are used in GitHub it is possible to understand the popularity of programming languages among developers and also to discover the unique characteristics of each language.