Personally, in my heart, I'm kinda keeping fingers crossed for a future where if one needs to/has to, one uses Rust (mostly where one would use C/C++ today, including for "squeezing the last drop of performance", and especially high risk everpresent libraries like libpng; plus as an extra, probably for highly ambitious parallelism like in Servo); otherwise, one just goes with Go (for the amazing general productivity and readability).
Though then there's also Luna-lang, which I'm hoping even stronger to become long-term a new breakthrough paradigm/tech in programming & scripting...
On a mostly unrelated note, but continuing with off the sofa predictions, I'm curious on a few more developments:
- whether WebAsm will become the new de-facto universal architecture — at least for VMs, but I wonder if we won't eventually end up living on purely WebAsm CPUs at some point in future? (Unless WebAsm has some inherently hardware-hostile design decisions; I'm not a CPU/ISA guy to know that.)
- then RISC-V; will it become the ultimate personal computer/device CPU in the meanwhile? Also, what may happen if both RISC-V and WebAsm start naturally competing in this domain eventually?
- Fuchsia off-handedly dethroning the Linux kernel & ecosystem (and maybe even Windows) as the sudden standard mainstream OS (and thus also, amusingly, suddenly swinging the Tannenbaum's argument up through a semi-random caprice of Google's deep pockets)?
Especially per the last point, I wonder if we'll eventually end up in a world with much more... "secure"... personal devices. And if yes, will it end up being net good or bad (or just neutral/hard to say/nuanced, a.k.a. both, as usually) for humanity. Given that I'm recently realizing that "secure" unfortunately seems to be a very close sibling, or even maybe just an other face of, "closed" — think DRM, walled-garden ecosystems, no more rooted Android or XBOX... or even no more control at all over your PC, a.k.a. no general computing for the masses, potentially. Though I personally stay mostly hopeful on this front; in part because I think I believe people are as a sum too chaotic for this to be able to happen completely.
