With how much I hear about Rust on here, a little surprising to see it behind the likes of Haskell and and Perl!
Kotlin is doing really well for its age especially, I'm guessing mostly used by Android devs (so far).
I was pretty disappointed in the lack of progress, but a few things come to mind:
1. IMO Rust has the closest thing in "imperative" languages to haskell's type system in a recently released "mainstream" language.
2. Rust brings an entirely new value (memory safety), and accordingly an entirely new hurdle called the borrow checker. This feature is so advanced that languages like Haskell are catching up (it's not a competition really) by introducing things like Linear Types[0]. That's really impressive.
3. Rust is targeting system programmers -- they move the slowest (as they should) in the ecosystem and are the most risk averse (as they should be).
4. Compare Rust to relatively recent systems-level languages (I won't name any), it's doing great.
5. Staying at the same place in the rankings is actually moving forward -- it may not seem like it, but it's hard to stay both effective, liked, and relevant in the world of programming languages (see: Dart).
I don't think rust is the kind of language to just shoot up the rankings -- it contains both higher level techniques that aren't quite mainstream yet and is targeted at a smaller community (though they're kind of going after web people with the wasm stuff).
I think rust is the kind of language that shows up to be consistently near the top of the rankings in 10 years (and I've said it numerous times but I think Go will displace Java and Rust will displace C/C++ where possible).
Yes, I will concede to a slight bias in favor of rust :).
Not sure about you saying it will replace C. I could understand C++ though.
I do think eventually it could replace C though -- because rust with `unsafe` blocks still has the possibility of being safer than C. This could be a boon to security critical software, as long as the performance margin isn't too hard. Shops that have found ways to write safe C will likely never move (they don't need to), but new ones might pick rust where they might have picked C otherwise.
BTW, the embedded support in rust is really impressive for such a young language: https://github.com/rust-embedded/awesome-embedded-rust