What the 2023 Rust Survey Reveals About Global Adoption and Future Challenges

At the beginning of this month, Google announced a $1 million donation to the Rust Foundation to support an "Interop Initiative" aimed at improving C++ and Rust interoperability.

With Rust becoming the second official language of the Linux kernel, the latest Linux 6.8 kernel ships with Rust 1.75, and upcoming patches will move kernel Rust code to Rust 1.76 and prepare for Rust 1.77.

The Rust community recently released the 2023 Rust Annual Survey after polling nearly ten thousand developers worldwide.

China's Rust Developer Share

Chinese developers account for 6% of the global Rust community.

In 2023, the proportion of developers using Rust rose slightly from 91% in 2022 to 93%.

49% of respondents said they use Rust daily (or almost daily), a 2‑point increase from the previous year.

The top ten countries for Rust developers are: United States (22%), Germany (12%), China (6%), United Kingdom (6%), France (6%), Canada (3%), Russia (3%), Netherlands (3%), Japan (3%) and Poland (3%).

92.7% of respondents prefer English for technical discussions, slightly down from 93% in 2022; Chinese is the second most common language at 6.1% (down from 7%).

Linux and VS Code Are the Most Used Tools

Among developers who have not used Rust, 31% cite difficulty as the main barrier, while 67% say they simply have not had the opportunity to learn it.

When asked why they stopped using Rust, 46% mentioned lack of control or company R&D requirements, 31% found a better language, and 24% felt Rust was too hard.

Over the past year, respondents’ self‑assessed Rust expertise deepened: 23% can write simple programs (down 6 points), 28% can write production‑ready code (up 1 point), and 47% believe Rust improves their work efficiency (up from 42% in 2022).

Concerns and Expectations for Rust’s Future

Out of 9,374 respondents, 43% worry Rust may become overly complex (up 5 points), 42% fear low adoption in the tech industry, and 32% are concerned about insufficient support for Rust developers and maintainers (up 6 points).

Conversely, respondents indifferent to Rust’s future dropped from 30% in 2022 to 18% in 2023.

The most requested improvements are for traits (trait aliases, associated type defaults), const execution (generic const expressions, const trait methods), and async features (async closures, coroutines).

About 20% of respondents would like Rust to slow the pace of new feature development due to complexity concerns. The most painful areas for users remain asynchronous Rust, traits, the generics system, and the borrow checker.

Respondents prioritize fixing compiler bugs (68%), improving runtime performance (57%), and reducing compilation time (45%). While compile time is a key improvement area, many consider runtime performance even more important.

For the full 2023 Rust Survey results, visit: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2024/02/19/2023-Rust-Annual-Survey-2023-results.html

Related Reading

Ubuntu大佬神操作！Rust版Linux调度器秀麻了，性能远超C

谷歌向 Rust 基金会捐赠 100 万美元，改进 Rust 与 C++ 的互操作性

Rust 开发者路线图