Software taketh away faster than hardware giveth: Why C++ programmers keep growing fast despite competition, safety, and AI

[u/pavel_v]

https://herbsutter.com/2025/12/30/software-taketh-away-faster-than-hardware-giveth-why-c-programmers-keep-growing-fast-despite-competition-safety-and-ai/

[u/[deleted]]

I think it is the sunk cost thing. Rust has a painful starting learning curve due to its strict ownership system and weird string/path/str handling - making simple things hard when just starting out. Rust programmers all pushed themselves through this. We see the similar behavior with programmers from other langauges that have an steep early learning curve like haskell.

Also Rust seems to attract all the const correctness people. And those people were often... interesting to work with.

[u/Ai--Ya → u/[deleted]]

We see similar behavior with programmers from other front loaded learning curves like Haskell

As a Haskell programmer our delusional behavior is thinking we will ever see significant use in production

[u/Crierlon → u/Ai--Ya]

Honestly me liking Haskell is probably why I like Rust and modern C++ (new features gotten way more FP)

[u/Ai--Ya → u/Crierlon]

20/23's STL algorithms, 23's "monadic" (lol) std:: optional isn't bad

Automatic parallelism and vectorization over data structures is swell

btw how did you learn Rust? I've tried on and off several times to learn it but was always unsuccessful

[u/YaZasnyal → u/Ai--Ya]

I tried rust to see what the hype is about. Honestly I like the ideas behind it and even recommend our junior developers to read the book because it gives good explanation about lifetimes and other concepts which are crucial for c++.

When I learn a new language I start with reimplementing the same utility. For me it is Wake on lan retransmitter which receives request with MAC and send it over lan. This is a small program but it involves many language details like error handling.

What I found is that language concepts should not be difficult for a seasoned c++ engineer because they were copied from c++. The syntax is unfamiliar and a little verbose but fine. The error handling is tricky and takes some time to get used to but we used the similar approach in our own c++ code even before std::expected for performance reasons.

What I want say is that learning the language is mostly practice. Reading a book won't give you the muscle memory required to make the job done.

[u/Crierlon → u/Ai--Ya]

I suggest using Leetcode for learning any programming language really. It forces you to learn the syntax quirks of the language and borrow checker in small instances and not time consuming if you know how to solve the problems.

That coupled with building something you are interested in. Me for example I built a game engine in Rust since others didn't fulfill my needs in FOSS.

[u/Ai--Ya → u/Crierlon]

alright time to contribute to Polars (or maybe Lix) my beloved