The State of Rust survey results for 2024 are out, showing increased productivity but also that slow compilation and debugging difficulty remain big challenges. Another concern is that Rust usage does not seem to be growing as hoped, despite its security advantages, and developers cite lack of usage and high complexity as reasons to worry about its future.

The survey targets Rust developers specifically, so it cannot be taken as a snapshot of Rust usage versus other languages. However, data can be found elsewhere, such as to the Stack Overflow developer survey, which showed Rust usage slightly declining, at 12.6 percent in 2024, versus 13.05 percent in 2023.

In line with that decline, fewer developers started the latest State of Rust survey, 9,450 down from 11,950 in 2023, and even fewer completed it, 7,310 down from 9,710. The Rust survey team attributes this to a shorter time window for submissions, two weeks in 2024 compared to almost a month in 2023. While that must be a factor, these figures also suggest that Rust usage is not growing much, despite recommendation from prominent organizations including the US government and companies including Microsoft, largely for security reasons.

A possible reason is that Rust is too complex and challenging to learn. In 2023, fewer than half (47 percent) of respondents considered themselves productive in Rust. This figure has improved to 53 percent, though it remains striking that such a substantial proportion remain at an experimental or learning phase with the language.

When asked about their biggest worries for Rust’s future, 45.5 percent cited “not enough usage in the tech industry,” up from 42.5 percent last year, just ahead of the 45.2 percent who cited complexity as a concern. Other substantial worries include too little support for Rust’s developers and maintainers, and project governance issues. Only 18.6 percent declared themselves “not worried,” though this is a slight improvement on 17.8 percent in 2023.

Support for Rust in the Linux kernel might be expected to boost the language; but instead has been a source of controversy thanks to vocal opposition from maintainers who believe that kernel code should only use C – such as Christoph Hellwig, who likened the addition of another language to a cancer and said that Rust should not be “anywhere near a huge C code base that I need to maintain.”

If patches to enable further integration of Rust with the kernel fail to be approved, that threatens the future of the whole Rust for Linux project.

Another question asks whether respondents are using Rust at work. 38.2 percent claimed to use it for most of their coding, and 13.4 percent a few times a week, accounting for just over half of responses. At the organization level there is a similar pattern. 45.5 percent of organizations represented by respondents make “non-trivial use of Rust,” up from 38.7 percent last year. While these figures are up since 2023, they also show that many respondents are not yet able to make much use of Rust for work. 

Rust is suitable for system programming, but judging by the survey it is also popular for general use. The biggest category of usage is for server applications (53.4 percent), followed by distributed systems (25.3 percent) and cloud computing applications (24.3 percent).

Rust developers predominantly use Linux (73.7 percent) and increasingly so: the percentage has risen each year since 2022. The next most popular is macOS (32.4 percent) with Windows at 29.8 percent – though 13.3 percent of those developers on Windows use WSL (Subsystem for Linux).

Linux is also the most popular target for Rust applications (87.1 percent) though there is significant interest in WebAssembly, with 23 percent targeting WebAssembly in the browser, and 7.7 percent WebAssembly for other hosts. There is no direct comparison with previous years as last time round all WebAssembly usage was lumped together.

Visual Studio Code (VS Code) remains the most popular IDE for Rust with 56.7 percent usage, but its share has dropped by 5 percent and there is notable take-up (8.9 percent) for the Rust-built Zed editor, despite its unfinished status.