Programming Languages in 2025: Rust, Go and C++

Programming Languages in 2025: Rust, Go and C++

Rust

Rust 2024 Edition was officially stabilized with Rust 1.85 (Feb 2025) (Announcing Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024 | Rust Blog) (Announcing Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024 | Rust Blog). This is Rust’s largest edition yet, introducing a number of opt-in changes to improve safety and clarity. Notably, Rust 2024 requires explicit unsafe blocks in more scenarios – for example, extern C function blocks now must be marked unsafe (Announcing Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024 | Rust Blog), and certain unsafe attributes (like no_mangle) are restricted (Announcing Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024 | Rust Blog). These changes tighten Rust’s safety guarantees by default, catching more undefined behavior at compile time. The edition also prepared for future features: it reserved the keyword gen for upcoming generator coroutines (Announcing Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024 | Rust Blog) and reserved new syntax for potential improvements in string literals (Announcing Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024 | Rust Blog). On the tooling side, the compiler and rustdoc saw performance gains – e.g. documentation tests are now consolidated into a single binary, significantly speeding up test runs (Announcing Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024 | Rust Blog). Stable Rust over the past year also gained long-awaited features like Generic Associated Types (now fully stable) and improved const evaluation, making compile-time computation more powerful. Rust’s commitment to performance and reliability is reflected in industry adoption: for instance, parts of the Linux kernel and Windows OS are being written in Rust to eliminate entire classes of memory-safety bugs (New Linux Kernel Code Written in Rust Aims to Eliminate Memory ...) (Rust Unwrapped: A 2024 Year in Review | by Rustaceans Editors). (Sources: Official Rust blog (Announcing Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024 | Rust Blog) (Announcing Rust 1.85.0 and Rust 2024 | Rust Blog); Rust Edition Guide.)

Go

Go’s development emphasizes incremental improvements with each six-month release. Go 1.22 (Feb 2024) brought two small but impactful language changes: it finally fixed the infamous loop variable capture issue (so for-loop closures each get their own copy of the loop variable) and it introduced the ability to iterate directly over integers (e.g. for i := range 10 { ... }) for convenience (Go 1.22 is released! - The Go Programming Language) (Go 1.22 is released! - The Go Programming Language). Performance-wise, Go’s runtime saw memory optimizations yielding a ~1–3% CPU uplift and ~1% memory footprint reduction for most programs (Go 1.22 is released! - The Go Programming Language). Profile-guided optimization (PGO), introduced in Go 1.21, was improved in 1.22 – better devirtualization of interface calls can give 2–14% speed boosts on PGO-enabled builds (Go 1.22 is released! - The Go Programming Language). The standard library continues to evolve: Go 1.22 added a new math/rand/v2 with faster algorithms, enhanced the net/http router to support REST-style route patterns (with wildcards and method filtering), and introduced conveniences like a slices.Concat function for concatenating slices generically (Go 1.22 is released! - The Go Programming Language) (Go 1.22 is released! - The Go Programming Language). Earlier, Go 1.20 and 1.21 solidified support for generics (added in 1.18) and added built-in fuzz testing, reflecting Go’s focus on robustness. Go’s ethos of simplicity and safety also extends to security updates (like regular TLS library fixes and dependency checksum verifications in the Go module proxy). (Sources: Official Go 1.22 Release Notes (Go 1.22 is released! - The Go Programming Language) (Go 1.22 is released! - The Go Programming Language).)

C++

The latest ISO C++ standard, C++23, was completed in 2023, bringing a collection of incremental improvements to the language and library. On the language side, C++23 introduced features such as “deducing this” (explicit object function parameters) which let member functions participate in template type deduction more easily (C++23 - cppreference.com). It added simpler syntax and semantics in several areas: a multi-dimensional subscript operator (obj[a, b, c]) for indexing multi-index structures was added (C++23 - cppreference.com); new preprocessing directives #elifdef/#elifndef and #warning were added for convenience (C++23 - cppreference.com); and minor tweaks like making temporaries in range-for loops last longer (preventing dangling references) were adopted (C++23 - cppreference.com) (C++23 - cppreference.com). C++23 also introduced an [[assume(condition)]] attribute to hint optimizer assumptions (C++23 - cppreference.com) and officially sanctioned std::embed for embedding files as constexpr data (in the standard library). On the library side, C++23 added useful utilities: a standard std::expected type for error handling (similar to Result in other languages) was included, as were std::print and std::println functions for easy printing to stdout (no more printf/iostream quirks) (What's new for C++ in Visual Studio 2022 - Microsoft Learn) (C++23 Is Finalized. Here Comes C++26 | by Antony Polukhin | Yandex). Other library additions include better support for ranges (e.g. views::enumerate), stack trace utilities, and synchronization primitives. While C++23 is mostly a “minor” update (focused on consistency and completeness), compilers like GCC, Clang, and MSVC have quickly implemented these features (What's new for C++ in Visual Studio 2022 - Microsoft Learn) (C++23 Is Finalized. Here Comes C++26 | by Antony Polukhin | Yandex). Looking ahead, proposals for memory safety (like lifetime checks and perhaps a future C++ Safety profile) are in discussion, influenced by the wider secure coding movement. (Sources: cppreference for C++23 features (C++23 - cppreference.com) (C++23 - cppreference.com).)

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