Hi,
I am a contributor of the Rust project and in our newsletter (This Week in Rust) I've found a link to your latest newsletter:
https://weeklyrust.substack.com/p/state-of-rust-survey-findings
I am also co-maintainer of the Rust Survey and have authored the blog post you mention in your findings article. I think there are a few inaccuracies or biased representions:
Production use keeps climbing. 38% of respondents report significant Rust usage at their organizations, and 25 % expect their company to hire Rust developers next year. Web services (60 %), embedded (50 %), and CLI tools (48 %) lead.
Unsure where these numbers come from: if they refer to the question "Are you personally using Rust at work?", the correct number should be that almost 40% use Rust regularly at work ("Yes, for the majority of my coding").
"Web Services" (which I assume you mean by coalescing server-side and cloud computing applications) amount for about 53% and 52%, see graph for "In what technology domain(s) is Rust used at your organisation?", embedded use exceed 50% when adding all embedded areas in the graph.
Learning resources are excellent: 98 % rely on the official docs, 58 % on books, and 49 % on crate source code
86% of the respondents rely on official documentation, 84.7% on books etc. ... those numbers look incorrect
Rust’s learning curve remains a barrier. Among the 358 respondents who don’t use Rust, 22 % called Rust “too difficult to learn,” with word-clouds full of “syntax,” “confusing,” and even “toxic.”
Clarification: the word "Toxic" in the wordcloud for "Why don't you use Rust?" is very small and comes from that 13.2% of "other" answers. Comparing to other objective hurdles like "being complex" (31.7%) doesn't really give justice to the proportions. I didn't find (or maybe I just missed) the word "confusing" you quoted.
Compile times and disk usage remain major complaints: 17% say slow compilation is a serious problem, and 34% say it could be significantly better.
Yes, compile times are the #1 complaint but the percentage we publish is 27.2% and 54.7% declare that "could be improved, but does not limit me"
Formal education remains rare. 94.5% haven’t taken a Rust course in the last year.
Unsure why this is a concern. Also considering that +61% of our respondents state that they have +10 years of programming experience :-) Besides "94.5%" is from 2024 , for 2025 the percentage was 94.8%. Small difference, just missed the right column.
Enterprise adoption still feels hesitant: 36 % of organizations have no plans to hire Rust devs, and 29 % simply don’t know.
The graph for "Is your organisation planning on hiring Rust developers in the next year?" shows that 19.5% of organizations not planning to hire Rust experts
Deeper community involvement is low, 77 % have never attended a Rust conference ...
Unsure where this number comes from
... and 87 % have never contributed to an RFC.
This is a piece of data that without context shows a wrong bias. Contributing an RFC is a quite specialized work that often requires domain knowledge. Not contributing an RFC carries no meaning per se.
[...] fix the learning curve and compile times, and Rust could go from popular to dominant.
Well, that's a bold statement, we in the Rust project really wish it was that simple :-)
May I ask if you used some LLM to write that article? Asking because since they are not able to reason about data, they sometimes mixup facts and numbers.
As I read that you're happy to listen to feedback, I hope this feedback will be somewhat helpful.
Hi,
I am a contributor of the Rust project and in our newsletter (This Week in Rust) I've found a link to your latest newsletter:
https://weeklyrust.substack.com/p/state-of-rust-survey-findings
I am also co-maintainer of the Rust Survey and have authored the blog post you mention in your findings article. I think there are a few inaccuracies or biased representions:
Unsure where these numbers come from: if they refer to the question "Are you personally using Rust at work?", the correct number should be that almost 40% use Rust regularly at work ("Yes, for the majority of my coding").
"Web Services" (which I assume you mean by coalescing server-side and cloud computing applications) amount for about 53% and 52%, see graph for "In what technology domain(s) is Rust used at your organisation?", embedded use exceed 50% when adding all embedded areas in the graph.
86% of the respondents rely on official documentation, 84.7% on books etc. ... those numbers look incorrect
Clarification: the word "Toxic" in the wordcloud for "Why don't you use Rust?" is very small and comes from that 13.2% of "other" answers. Comparing to other objective hurdles like "being complex" (31.7%) doesn't really give justice to the proportions. I didn't find (or maybe I just missed) the word "confusing" you quoted.
Yes, compile times are the #1 complaint but the percentage we publish is 27.2% and 54.7% declare that "could be improved, but does not limit me"
Unsure why this is a concern. Also considering that +61% of our respondents state that they have +10 years of programming experience :-) Besides "94.5%" is from 2024 , for 2025 the percentage was 94.8%. Small difference, just missed the right column.
The graph for "Is your organisation planning on hiring Rust developers in the next year?" shows that 19.5% of organizations not planning to hire Rust experts
Unsure where this number comes from
This is a piece of data that without context shows a wrong bias. Contributing an RFC is a quite specialized work that often requires domain knowledge. Not contributing an RFC carries no meaning per se.
Well, that's a bold statement, we in the Rust project really wish it was that simple :-)
May I ask if you used some LLM to write that article? Asking because since they are not able to reason about data, they sometimes mixup facts and numbers.
As I read that you're happy to listen to feedback, I hope this feedback will be somewhat helpful.