According to new research, Rust developers are worried that the programming language will become too complex and that its popularity in the tech industry will not meet expectations.
The rust project surveyed 9,710 developers worldwide, and the United States, Germany, China and the United Kingdom represent almost half of those surveyed. The vast majority (93%) were Rust users and more than 80% of them use the coding language at least once a week.
The Rust Project survey results showed growing support for Rust as a programming language choice.
A third (33%) said they used Rust for most of their programming at work and 28% said they used it occasionally. As for why they used Rust, 86% said it was for the ability to create “relatively correct and bug-free software,” compared to 82% last year.
The second most popular reason was Rust's particular performance characteristics (speed, memory, and footprint), which 83% of developers specifically highlighted as a major draw.
Rust developers praise language's security benefits
Rust's safety and security properties were important to 70%, while a similar proportion also said it was “enjoyable or fun” to program in Rust.
Nearly four in five respondents (79%) said the programming language helped their company achieve its goals, a jump from 71% last time, while 77% of respondents said its organization to use Rust again in the future.
However, 8% said that Rust adoption had slowed down the team. In terms of use, Rust is popular for creating backend servers, web and networking services, and cloud technologies.
Rust is a difficult programming language to learn
However, the survey identified less positive comments. Of those surveyed who didn't use Rust, 31% said it was because it was “too difficult” to learn or would take too much time.
Of former Rust users who participated in the 2023 survey, 24% cited difficulty as the main reason for giving up, although this marks a drop from 30% last year.
When asked “what are your biggest concerns for the future of Rust?” the majority (43%) were concerned that Rust would become too complex (43%), up from 37% in 2022.
Meanwhile, 42% of respondents were concerned about the low level of Rust usage in the tech industry and 32% of respondents in 2023 were concerned that Rust developers and maintainers were not receiving adequate support.
There was also a big drop in the number of respondents who were not at all worried about the future of Rust: down to 18% in 2023 from 30% in 2022.
When asked what features Rust users wanted to implement or improve, 20% of respondents said they wanted Rust to slow down the development of new features, which the report said “probably goes hand in hand with the aforementioned concern.” before Rust gets slower.” too complex.”
James Governor, co-founder of developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk, said frameworks can address the growing complexity in programming languages, and the greater the complexity, the greater the usefulness.
When it comes to Rust, he said ITPro That usage is “steadily increasing,” pointing to some notable wins by hyperscalers and cloud companies regarding adoption.
Rust is particularly common in new infrastructure projects, the Governor added.
“Rust is not yet becoming a general-purpose programming language, like Python did when it overtook Java, but it is seeing steady growth in adoption, which we expect to continue. It seems like a sustainable success story right now.”
Rust is gaining popularity, but it still has a way to go
The research on the growing popularity of Rust as a programming language aligns closely with similar analysis from Stack Overflow's 2023 developer survey. The study found that Rust was among the most admired languages, and more than 80% of developers who use it are looking to expand its use.
But it is not the most common, ranking only 14th on the list of most used and lucrative coding languages.
Rust is ranked 18th in Tiobe's ranking of the most popular programming languages.
The programming language is less than a decade old but has grown rapidly; The Linux kernel now supports Rust, for example, and Microsoft is also rewriting part of the Windows kernel in Rust.
