The results of the fourth annual Rust Survey have been released, covering the responses of almost 4,000 developers. Rust  began life at Mozilla and has been around for ten years. The latest release is Rust 1.42.

The aim of Rust is to offer a safe, fast and concurrent language without having a garbage collector. It is constructed so that problems are detected at compile time so that it can be used safely for systems programming.

The survey was available in 14 different languages, and while nearly 70 percent answered in English, 10.8 percent of respondents answered in Chinese. This might explain why one of the main answers to what respondents would like to see improved was availability of documentation in other languages, including Chinese. The Rust development team is currently hard at work on translating the documentation.

In terms of how often the respondents use Rust and what they use it for, 27.6 percent now use Rust daily, up from 17.5 percent in 2017.  40.9 percent use Rust weekly, and 19.8 percent do so monthly. The most common industry sector for full-time Rust developers was backend web development., followed by distributed and embedded systems.

A major focus of the survey was how various aspects have improved (or not) over the past year, and the respondents were clear that not everything has got better. Most people thought adoption levels had seen 'some improvement', but asked about compile time, the majority of responses were split between 'slight' and 'some' improvement, with far fewer people - under 250 of the 4000 respondents - thinking things had got a lot better.

People were even less convinced about GUI development improvements, with most opting for 'don't know' as an answer, and the rest mainly split between 'no change' and 'slight improvement'.

Areas where respondents felt there had been real improvements include async I/O, IDE experience, library support and tools & support.

More Information

Rust Website

Rust Developer Survey Results

Related Articles

Rust 2018 Released To Improve Developer Productivity

Rust Survey Revelations

Rust 1.28 Improves Memory Use

Rust 1.26 Adds Existential Types

Rust 1.24 Adds Reformatter

Rust 1.23 Uses Less Memory

Rust 1.20 Adds Associated Contents

Rust 1.16

Updated Rust Improves Documentation

Rust 1.6 Released

Rust 1.3 Released

Rust Releases New Versions

Rust Hits Stable 1.0 - So What?

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info