If Rust was really that superior, would companies using it not have a competitive advantage in the market?

> have a competitive advantage in the market

In theory, yes, but there are two problems:

(1) You need to either hire or train someone to write in Rust, and neither is trivial amount of effort. And at the end of the day, you need to push features out. Let's be real: you can find someone to write JavaScript to do full stack development, anywhere in the world, for a cheap price. Rust? The code may be more robust and easier to maintain in the long run, but it's hard to do that unless you already set up a team for that.

(2) Most software companies don't actually care that much about the language they use, the tech stack, or their infrastructure in general. Remember there are lots and lots of software companies that are not Google/Meta etc, and they are not at the bleeding edge of have state-of-the-art infrastructure. Saying that as someone working at a company with thousands of developers, and there are millions of old, ugly, almost unmaintainable Perl code in our core infrastructure running right now. From outside, it all looks fine.

Languages are fungible at most scales

How many wildly successful finance firms are running COBOL somewhere on the backend? How many successful healthcare systems are running MUMPS? Bad languages don't seem to kill companies, just make disgruntled developers and bad products.

Funny enough, there's a bunch of Javascript tooling for which being written in rust, as opposed to thee one they are replacing written in js itself, is their competitive advantage.

There's a huge amount of legacy code that cannot be replaced overnight. There's thousands of person-hours invested in such codebases and they need to be maintained. There's also a much greater number of experienced C++ programmers available versus Rust programmers with the same level of experience (especially working experience, not just the language itself), so that's another factor.

So companies with lots of earning potential in greenfield projects might indeed have a competitive advantage, while it's more difficult for those with products that have a large existing C++ codebase.

That is, unfortunately, not how anything works.

Maybe. The writer notes other technologies that were superior (on some axis) and won second place:

> But Rust is better in the same way that Betamax was better than VHS, Mastodon is better than Twitter, Dvorak keyboards are better than QWERTY, Esperanto is better than English and Lua is better than Javascript