Why Rust is the Best Choice for Modern Software Development

If you are paying any attention to the IT world in recent years, you probably have heard the word Rust when talking about programming on more than one occasion. You may even be aware, more or less, of why that is and why so many people are excited and jumping on the Rust bandwagon. The commonly used phrases are:

• Rust is a system language (true, but I believe that it will take over the other areas than system programming in the near future, see the crates analysis section for proof ;) )
• Rust has great memory safety built-in
• Rust is fast
• Rust is concurrent

You can find a ton of blog posts proving the above and talking about how fast or safe Rust is. If you’ve ever heard about Rust, it's probably one of those things you were probably hearing about. For this reason, I will not write another blog post about Rust's nice features. Instead, I will focus on some aspects you may consider when checking out existing tools, technologies, frameworks, and, most importantly - language - before you start a new project or decide to rewrite some existing microservice into a more performant and safer Rust version.

Why Rust

When picking up a language for your team, there are always candidates who are highly hyped at the time (and currently, Rust is definitely one of them). Still, if you are a seasoned CTO or manager in the IT company, you know that hype is not enough to make a decision, you need to have some solid information about the technology, where it is going, who is using it, is it going to stay for longer and, most importantly, if you find people willing to work with it.

If you are such a person or you want to persuade such a person cos you love Rust yourself, I have compiled a list of not so obvious Rust advantages which you can use when considering a switch either in your project or a team.

I have analysed a couple of sources with freely available data so that you can check where Rust is, who wants to use it, whether the Rust ecosystem (crates) is ready for it, and how the job market looks for Rust engineers or those who want to become ones.

TIOBE Index: Rust programming language

According to the widely recognized TIOBE Index that measures the popularity of programming languages (it’s updated monthly and provides insights into trends in software development) Rust gained a lot of popularity in the last two years.

Tiobe Index Rust

TIOBE Index is based on the number of search engine results for queries containing the name of a programming language which is then aggregated and normalized to produce a ranking. Although it can be used as a guiding language choice for new projects it’s not without drawbacks associated mainly with the search engine data and algorithms which can be influenced by many factors and are subject to fluctuations.

Stack Overflow Developer survey

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey is another widely known report to assess the popularity of the language, tool or technology. The data is gathered every year from developers worldwide. The survey highlights the trends in programming language usage and preferences and can bring some insights to what is getting popular at the time but also what developers around the world want to learn and are interested in.

2024 Survey

Admired and desired

“Rust continues to be the most-admired language with an 83% score this year.” Worth noting is that the Desired percentage is also relatively very high (28.7%), which gives the 6th place overall and 1st when talking about admiration.

12.6% of respondents picked Rust as their language when replying to the question, “Which programming, scripting, and markup languages have you done extensive development work in over the past year, and which do you want to work in over the next year? (If you both worked with the language and want to continue to do so, please check both boxes in that row).”

This places Rust on the 14th position but its no longer a niche language (in comparison Java has 30.3%).

2023 Survey

In 2023 Rust (again) was a top choice for developers who want to use new technology (for the past 8 years) indicating strong interest from those who weren’t using it yet.

Rust maintained its position as the “most admired”, with nearly 85% of developers who have used it wanting to continue.

Admired

On the “Programming, scripting, and markup languages” ranking, Rust took 14th place with a 13.05% share in commonly used languages.

2022 Survey

In 2022, Rust was used by 9.32% as a language for extensive development work.

According to the survey, for the seventh consecutive year, Rust was the “most loved”, with 87% of developers who have used it expressing interest in continuing.

The most loved

Community

I have analysed a couple of the most popular communities about programming on Reddit only. The links to each one and the number of members watching posts from those communities are listed below:

Rust has a very strong and growing community, almost with as many members as Java itself. I haven’t added the Python or JavaScript on the graph itself as they are multiple times larger than the rest of the languages analyzed. Similarly, C is not on the graph as the community around it on Reddit itself is small when compared to others.

Reddit Communities

Of course only the main subreddits were checked for the number of members but around each programming language there are additional communities, eg for Rust there are communities like learn_rust (https://www.reddit.com/r/learnrust/) with 31k members or game_dev(https://www.reddit.com/r/rust_gamedev/) with 40k members.

Rust Crates

Daily downloads

Number of users/teams owning a crate on crates.io

Interesting statistics to watch for are the number of libraries created every year for rust as well as number of downloads of those crates from crates.io website.

The statistics are available on lib.rs website and show a continuous growth, stating that the growth rate of the downloads is 2x per year.

At the time of writing there are 42,712 users or teams that have a crate on crates.io and the number of owners is growing at a rate of 1.2× per year.

On the same website you can check in which categories Rust is shining, not surprisingly there are many related to systems programming but worth noticing is how large the web programming, http server and database related crates areas are.

Perks of Rust programming language

Jobs

Last but not least, when talking about the language popularity and technology of choice, the important aspect is the number of open positions for Rust developers popping up all over the internet. This is a really slow growth but still a growth (in contrast to some more popular languages those days).

Rust jobs

According to Filtra.io and what they are posting on their website (https://filtra.io/rust/jobs-report/oct-24) we can see a growing trend in Rust jobs available on the market, each month (at least this year) we either have more companies looking for Rust developers or more open Rust developer positions (sometimes both).

Wrap up

There are possibly many more sources we could analyze to check if the language's popularity is growing (like books written recently, the number of newly created projects on GitHub, etc.). Still, I’m convinced that the results there will be similar to what I have shown above. The Rust ecosystem is growing when you talk about developers using it when you see how many Rust libraries get created/downloaded, how big the community on Reddit itself has become, and finally, how many Rust jobs are available.

If you are the one who needs to decide on the new technology for your project, or maybe you have already decided but lack the resources - we are here to help.

If you are not fully convinced yet, come over for the Rustikon conference in March 2025, check out the vibrant community yourself, and talk to us in person about the challenges you have.

Why attend Rustikon 2025: a Rust conference for developers >>
Join Clippy Lint Implementer's Workshop with Andre Bogus

Check #MyRustStory:

• Michael Snoyman
• Andre Bogus
• Alexander Zaitsev