Adoption of Rust increases year on year, both by individual developers and in professional environments. Rust offers a safer alternative to classic programming languages, but challenges remain.
Each year, the Rust Foundation conducts a poll of developers on the use of Rust. The survey shows that Rust is being increasingly embraced by developers, both among individual developers and in professional environments. 53 percent of respondents say they use Rust (almost) daily, up 4 percentage points from last year. In addition, 45 percent indicated that their organization uses Rust substantially, an increase of 7 percentage points.
Notable is the rise of new development environments: although Visual Studio Code is still the most widely used, it is losing ground to new alternatives such as the Zed editor. Linux remains the most popular operating system among Rust developers, followed by macOS and Windows.
Safe, but slower
The main reasons for companies to use Rust are the stability and fault tolerance of the language, followed by its high performance. Rust is considered a safer alternative to classic programming languages such as C and C++. Despite its growing popularity, Rust still suffers from some bottlenecks.
Slow compilation times are the biggest annoyance among developers, followed by limited debugging and high disk usage. Another frequently mentioned concern is the complexity of Rust, especially with regard to asynchronous programming. For about 31 percent of non-users, the difficulty of learning the language is the main reason for staying away.
The survey confirms that Rust is a programming language on the rise and its influence in the software world is growing. Rust can count on wider acceptance among developers, both hobbyists and professionals. But to overthrow the established ones, Rust will have to become more mature. On GitHub, it will not make the top ten for the time being: there, Python reigns supreme.