Rust is growing

I have a theory, it might sound silly and unreasonable, but hear me out. I believe that Rust will take a huge share of the programming language market in the coming years.

Octoverse 2022 - The top programming languages

Octoverse 2023 - The state of open source and rise of AI in 2023

Compared to other languages, the percentage of Rust developers out there is insignificant. But if you look at just the speed of growth, the number of developers that use Rust is growing faster than any other language over the last few years and the speed of adoption is not showing any signs of slowing down.

Corporations are betting on Rust

It seems like no week can pass by without a company announcing how they are investing significant resources into Rust. Be it Apple, Google, Microsoft or Amazon, everyone is betting on Rust.

From @dwizzzleMSFT's twitter

Even companies like Vercel, that are primarily focused on the JavaScript ecosystem, are using Rust for the speed benefits.

From @rauchg's twitter

Rust is also becoming a first class citizen in many important open source projects, including the Linux kernel.

Compounding benefits

All of those investments compound. More people are exposed to Rust, more educational resources are created, tooling and platform support is improved. If you are using Rust day to day, it's easy to miss the snowball that is forming.

I know that I was taken by surprise while fundraising, and a few VCs reached out to me specifically because we use Rust. They see it as a competitive advantage and think it attracts the best developer talent out there. A year ago it was mostly the opposite situation, me needing to justify why picking Rust was a good idea for an early stage startup.

If you are interested in trying out Rust, today is a great time to do so. The Rust Programming Language book is available online for free and a great starting point.

~ Bernard