No you are not alone in being shocked by that statement. What they could have more accurately said is that C++ is becoming a legacy language within the subset of programmers that contribute to wide open open source projects hosted on GitHub. This is an important factor to consider for a project like Fish, given that the viability of the project depends entirely on getting (quite often very young and very bought in to the latest hotness) programmers to contribute their free time.
Serious business obviously still writes in C++ more than rust and so it isn't legacy, but I can see why somebody may not be excited about spending their free time writing C++, and so Rust is the better choice if it gets people excited to contribute.
> I still don't see jobs paying a tc of 250k+ for rust jobs. Those exist for cpp
They are out there, though the "in Rust" is part of the footnote usually.
I interviewed recently for a 350k+ job involving rust and the odd thing about it was that I'm an okay C++ programmer, but I'm about as good as the average rust programmer because it's not been popular for that long.
Nobody is asking for a decade+ experience on rust, only that you don't run away from it when you hit compilation fights with the borrow checker.
This is not just about Rust though, but because I'm a second systems sort of engineer who can go in replace an aging C++ platform slowly by rewriting bits of it or modularizing it as we go. And the pay matches how badly they want to tear out the tech debt in the rewrite pass (also how horrible it will be for the first 8-10 months).
COBOL programming also pays good money. It's usually when a language becomes "legacy" that pay starts rising, because the supply of interested programmers starts drying up.
Serious business obviously still writes in C++ more than rust and so it isn't legacy, but I can see why somebody may not be excited about spending their free time writing C++, and so Rust is the better choice if it gets people excited to contribute.