What's always been interesting about the languages Meta uses is the story of the rise and fall of the D programming language at Meta. I wasn't around at the time when Andrei was working there and advocating for its adoption, but it seemed like he hit a wall at some point. By the time I joined all D services were being deprecated or rewritten.

Rust seems to be doing far better. Though it's also worth noting that Go never got the same adoption as Rust either. Wonder if someone more familiar with the story of all these languages at Meta can comment on why that is.

Rust is far more widely used than D in the industry, so it's no surprised that it's more supported at Meta.

Re: Go, it's use cases overlap with the officially supported languages, so there's no broad need for it.

>> Rust is far more widely used than D in the industry

An off the cuff comment but all the same it made me think - how would you get data for an assertion like that. The usage of both D and Rust is notoriously low in the industry, a rounding error. That has to make it so hard to measure. Still, you'd expect D to be more popular because Rust's only been around 10-ish years or so.

If you click through the TIOBE rankings, it lists them right next to each other on page 3 of the results behind other languages i can't help but be sceptical of like SAS, Prolog, Scratch and Visual Fox Pro.

Indeed claims 5k job listings for "D Programming Language" (i call foul, that seems way too high) and 2k for rust.

Rust has been adopted by Mozilla (of course), Microsoft, Meta, Google/Acrobat, Amazon, and even Apple for key infrastructure, among tons of others major big players.

That's practically all of FAANG and more.

D never had that.

Mozilla is a c++ and javascript shop. What do they ship in Rust? How much of Firefox is written in rust for example?

>> Microsoft, Meta, Google/Acrobat, Amazon

Large firms have lots of devs and consequently lots of toy projects. Is their usage of rust more significant than their use of D? I mean Meta was churning out projects in D a while back (warp, flint, etc) and looked like it might be going all in at one point (they even hired one of the leads on D lang).

>> That's practically all of FAANG

Who were we missing? Netflix, they’ve dabbled with D too: https://github.com/Netflix/vectorflow

Don’t misunderstand my point - it’s not that D is more popular than rust, it’s that rust is not used for real work in any significant capacity yet.

Where’s the big project written in rust? Servo and the rust compiler are the only two large rust projects on github.