Rust Survey Finds Linux and VS Code Users, More WebAssembly Targeting

Rust's official survey team released results from their 8th annual survey "focused on gathering insights and feedback from Rust users". In terms of operating systems used by Rustaceans, the situation is very similar to the results from 2022, with Linux being the most popular choice of Rust users [69.7%], followed by macOS [33.5%] and Windows [31.9%], which have a very similar share of usage. Rust programmers target a diverse set of platforms with their Rust programs, even though the most popular target by far is still a Linux machine [85.4%]. We can see a slight uptick in users targeting WebAssembly [27.1%], embedded and mobile platforms, which speaks to the versatility of Rust.

We cannot of course forget the favourite topic of many programmers: which IDE (developer environment) do they use. Visual Studio Code still seems to be the most popular option [61.7%], with RustRover (which was released last year) also gaining some traction [16.4%].
The site ITPro spoke to James Governor, co-founder of the developer-focused analyst firm RedMonk, who said Rust's usage is "steadily increasing", pointing to its adoption among hyperscalers and cloud companies and in new infrastructure projects. "Rust is not crossing over yet as a general-purpose programming language, as Python did when it overtook Java, but it's seeing steady growth in adoption, which we expect to continue. It seems like a sustainable success story at this point."

But InfoWorld writes that "while the use of Rust language by professional programmers continues to grow, Rust users expressed concerns about the language becoming too complex and the low level of Rust usage in the tech industry." Among the 9,374 respondents who shared their main worries for the future of Rust, 43% were most concerned about Rust becoming too complex, a five percentage point increase from 2022; 42% were most concerned about low usage of Rust in the tech industry; and 32% were most concerned about Rust developers and maintainers not being properly supported, a six percentage point increase from 2022. Further, the percentage of respondents who were not at all concerned about the future of Rust fell, from 30% in 2022 to 18% in 2023.

IDE

[eneville]

Vim is still my favourite. RustRover is good though, a close second.

Re:IDE RustRover cost money!!

[SysEngineer]

I support Open Source!
RustRove will cost money!
NO Thank you.

Re:

[eneville]

vim is still best, IMO. Everyone's different, for what I do, vim fits best with the vast majority of what I need it for. Sometimes with IDEs it is almost like having an answer without a problem to solve with it.

Re:

[tlhIngan]

VS Code has a really nice Vim plugin that works quite well. Comes complete with a modification to the status bar to tell you everything you need to know about what's going on.

Like using a web browser as your IDE

[yuvcifjt]

Difficult to believe, an electron / javascript web application, which is relatively speaking, super bloated, using over half a gig of ram, and relatively speaking, slow (only kept up due to modern fast processors), and an IDE which itself needs to be parsed, has become one of the most popular developer tools for majority of developers (over 70%) [stackoverflow.co]!

On a grand scale, with so many developers using (effectively) a web browser as their IDE, imagine the amount of green house gases as a result of those cpu cycles an

Re:

[sg_oneill]

I'm *really* hoping that Zed gets ported over to other platforms and gets a bit more traction and features. I found it almost jarring how much more responsive it was than VS Code. We gave up so much as a profession when everyone moved off sublime text to Atom (and then VS Code).

Actually shit, I might still have my old activation code for Sublime text. I wonder how that things looking in 2024...

Re: Like using a web browser as your IDE

[Zolmarchus]

I use Sublime Text exclusively for work, as I refuse to use what's essentially a text editor that weighs in at 500 MB of frameworks (VSCode). I donâ(TM)t actually hold its memory usage against it so much as the disk footprint.

Anyway, Sublime is great in 2024. Very fast. Tons of customizations. Tons of packages. And by the way, Atom has a fork, it seems to be under active development. (pulsar-edit.dev)

- z

Re: Like using a web browser as your IDE

[Viol8]

Whos this "we"? I use vim. Have done for 20 years

Re:

[angel'o'sphere]

For what exactly?

I only use Vim for shell scripts (and similar, like awk/perl)

No idea how you would do a real project with it.

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

using over half a gig of ram

Who cares? 0.5 gig costs $2.

My computer has 32 gig. Why should I care if one of my primary tools uses 1.5% of that?

I have browser tabs that use more memory than that.

Re:

[e065c8515d206cb0e190]

a) it adds up if every software developer thinks like this b) the argument is also about CPU cycles (although I have no idea of the scale... if you were to remove all ads on all client devices everywhere, how many MWh/year would you save?)

Re: Like using a web browser as your IDE

[Viol8]

The same kind of thinking lead to msssive v8 engines getting single digit mpg. Fuels cheap, who cares right? Never mind the long term consequences.

Re:

[Bu11etmagnet]

> I have browser tabs that use more memory than that.

Hardly a thing to be proud of.

Re:

[piojo]

Telegram uses 240 MB after being open for only ten minutes. (Windows 11.)

Re:

[piojo]

But after a reboot and being open a couple hours, it's down to 60 MB. Curious.

Re:

[angel'o'sphere]

Two options, the JavaScript framework has a memory leak.
Or it has to do with what messages it receives and holds in memory, e.g. pictures and video.
Or it does not garbage collect before some event happens.

How much memory an app uses in "System Monitor" aka top: is completely irrelevant. The question is, how quick can it clean up and is it causing trouble to the rest of the system.

Re: Get a proper IDE

[Viol8]

Sadly the sheep mentality is very prevelant in IT

Re:

[buck-yar]

I learned on C and Visual Studio, and for me it was the step through debugger and variable watch that really helped. I don't know how people use some of the other tools that IMO make it cumbersome.

Re:

[Entrope]

Some developers run more than one OS on their development machines. I have Windows and Linux at work and Mac OS and Linux at home (with Windows in a VM). None of them are Rust-y, though -- they just Go.

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

Using an OS is not a false dichotomy. I believe if users have a Mac they can use all 3 at the same time with VMs. Also some people have more than one computer. Mind boggling, I know!

Re:

[gweihir]

Rust does not solve any problem I have, and at the same time it is cumbersome, stands in my way and is unfinished. Add the toxic community with its Messiah-complex and my interest in it is zero.

Re:

[buck-yar]

Are the LLMs good enough to convert someone's favorite language to something like Rust or vice versa?

I remember back in my high school programming class the assignment said it had to be in Pascal, I wrote the program first in C then went back through and converted it line by line to Pascal. Teacher was disappointed, said that wasn't the point of the exercise. I figured I could get it done quicker and less mistakes. Seems like most people would experience some sort of efficiency loss in learning/using anoth

Re:

[gweihir]

Different languages excel at different things and require different skills to code well in them. There is no general "efficiency loss".

Re:

[Phillip2]

It's strange. My experience of the community is that it was really very helpful. I learned Rust on my own, with no one else around to help locally, but the folks on Rust language forums were always happy to help, even if that involved a fairly detailed explanations. The community was very polite, supportive and no one once belittled every a rank beginner. It's one of the nicer corners of the internet and far from toxic.

Re:

[gweihir]

If a cult is friendly towards you, then you are getting groomed to join it.

Re:

[bug_hunter]

Jesus dude, it's a programming language - by that logic should we positively judge programming languages based on how unfriendly they are to people?

Re:

[gweihir]

Most programming languages do not have a cult attached to it. Rust does.

Re:

[piojo]

I generally think I'm a good programmer, and Rust was tremendously difficult at times. I eventually managed to solve all the problems I had (usually around multiple scopes that need mutable access to some data, or conflicting lifetimes).

But I don't learn the language of the month. I noticed Rust articles for at least two years before I decided a personal project would work well in Rust. I waited a decade before using python for anything more than absolutely necessary. (In that time, Python got a lot better,

Re:

[Phillip2]

I am not a great programmer because I don't do it enough, but I am good at learning new languages, even when the documentation is immature.

Rust was one of the harder ones that I have learned. It is hard to be sure, but I think that it has got a lot better over time, mostly because it's main complicating feature, the borrow checker, has got clever and more permissive. The documentation ecosystem has improved also, although that was already fairly good when I started with Rust.

Counter to this, the general env

Re:

[Phillip2]

Rust: the latest language to try and be a good tool for discerning programmers.

What?

[bug_hunter]

Languages designed for "crappy" programmers are typically script based, have no typing and have a bunch of trade offs that make performance slow and hard to stretch it out to large programs.

Rust for all it's faults doesn't suffer from any of that.