If you are like me and wondering "What makes carbon different from Rust or Zig?

    1. The ability to interoperate with a wide variety of code, such as classes/structs and templates, not just free functions.

    2. A willingness to expose the idioms of C++ into Carbon code, and the other way around, when necessary to maximize performance of the interoperability layer.

    3. The use of wrappers and generic programming, including templates, to minimize or eliminate runtime overhead.

In otherwords, what carbon can do that Rust can't do, is take a C++ class with a `foo` method and call that method. Or create a class with a `foo` method and call that method from C++. Probably one of the biggest hurdles to get over in C++ interopt. Most don't do that, instead you'd make a C function binding and struct and move data/invoke functions through that.

Sebb767

The syntax looks a lot like Rust, though. I'm surprised they made such a break when there explicit goal is to make migration from C++ as easy as possible. Also, Rust (from my biased point of view) is currently on its way to become the standard low-level language, so I'm not too confident that Rust-but-with-OO is enough of a selling point.

usrusr

Considering the seemingly endless list of things that deliberately don't break with the c++ legacy, new syntax is almost the only change left. And if you were about to give c++ a syntax reboot, why wouldn't you look at what successful other modern syntaxes are doing? "c++, but in a syntax for people accustomed to rust instead of in a syntax for people accustomed to C" sounds like a perfectly reasonable approach.

Your perception (and mine) that rust is about to become the new default for "true native" is perfectly consistent with this, a language for the rust generation for when they have to deal with the c++ legacy. A legacy that won't be going away any time soon. I suspect that the author (authors?) wouldn't disagree at all with "use Rust when possible, Carbon when you can't", my perception (from a quick glance at the site) is that they are fully aware of the limitations of the niche they have so clearly staked out.

mempko

The problem with C++ is it keeps getting better. There was a time when Rust was interesting to me but then C++11 came out. Then they kept improving it

mihaigalos

As far as I'm concerned, C++ is there for legacy purposes only.

There are some nice frameworks and tools using it, sure. Yes, you are required to learn it if you are studying CS.

Any serious new development today is done using more modern languages such as Rust (i.e.: the linkerd service mesh proxy [1] for encrypted pod communication in a k8s cluster).

As even the Linux kernel is slowly transitioning to using Rust [2], it's only a matter of time before an inflection point is reached and it goes mainstream (if not already.)

[1] https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd2-proxy

[2] https://hackaday.com/2022/05/17/things-are-getting-rusty-in-...