Revisiting Loop Recognition in C++ in Rust

Summary

Back in 2011, Google published a report for Scala Days 2011 comparing the idiomatic implementation of an algorithm in C++, Java, Go, and Scala.Over ten years later, the landscape has changed significantly.The 2011 Stack Overflow Survey (the second ever!) only asked users what languages they were proficient in. Let's pretend for a moment that proficency roughly correlates to popularity. Java leads the four with nearly 32% of respondents claiming some proficiency. C++ is in eighth with just over 26%. Scala gets a measly 0.5%, which puts it all the way into nineteenth place. And Go, having been introduced to the public only two years before, only has a single vote. Rust appears to have zero responses, which makes sense considering that it was a pet project until 2009 and wasn't stable until 2015.The 2024 Stack Overflow Survey asks some more interesting questions. Proficiency is replaced with popularity (languages users have worked with in the past year), and we also get to see which languages are "admired" (languages that users wish to continue using), and "desired" (languages users have not used, but want to). Starting with popularity, Java falls to seventh place with 30.3% of respondents having used it in the past year, C++ is in ninth with 23%, Go reaches a whopping 13.5% for thirteenth place, Rust is actually on the map now at 12.6% and fourteenth place, and Scala gets 2.6% and twenty-sixth place. The results for admired languages paint a slightly different picture. Rust is the most admired language with more than 80% of respondents wanting to use it again. Go sees just over 67%, Scala just over 50%, C++ around 53%, and Java around 48%. It's fair to say that Rust is a new contender to this race.The New ContenderAs does the paper, we will introduce Rust by regurgitating Wikipedia.Rust is a general-purpose programming language emphasizing performance, type safety, and concurrency. It enforces memory safety, meaning that all references point to valid memory. It does s...