Born out of Mozilla Research in the early 2010s, Rust has come a long way since first hitting a stable 1.0 release a decade ago.
In 2025, it's no longer just an exciting alternative to mainstream languages. For many, this systems programming language has become the new standard for performance-critical and security-sensitive applications.
But, is Rust's growth sustainable? Where is it making the biggest impact?
Let's look at what numbers say about Rust's popularity and usage.
Rust Remains a Persistent Favorite Among Developers
Year after year, developers express a strong preference for Rust in industry surveys.
For the ninth (yes, NINTH) year in a row, the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey named Rust the language that most developers used and want to use again, with an 83% admiration rate.
Such a high level of admiration is a strong indicator of developer satisfaction and a desire to continue working with the language.
Rust's usage is steadily increasing, even though its overall usage is still smaller compared to widely used languages like JavaScript and Python.
12.6% of all respondents in Stack Overflow’s annual survey had done extensive development work in Rust over the past year.
To put that in perspective, JetBrains' State of Developer Ecosystem Survey in 2024 estimated that 2,267,000 developers used Rust in a span of 12 months. Of these, 709,000 identified Rust as their primary language.
The 2024 State of Rust Survey further highlights this; 53% of Rust users in 2024 used the language on a daily or nearly daily basis. This signals a deeper integration of the language into developer workflows.
But why Rust? Let's take a look.
Rust Prioritizes Safety, Speed, and Productivity
Rust was initially conceived by Graydon Hoare at Mozilla as a safer alternative to C and C++. The goal was to eliminate common memory-related bugs that plague these languages. And it did.
Static typing and a sophisticated ownership and borrowing model control memory safety in Rust and prevent data races in concurrent programs without needing a garbage collector. This gives developers precise control over memory allocation and deallocation.
Jason Orendorff, a GitHub staff software engineer, says, “What’s great about Rust is that it’s both fast AND reliable.” Rust lets devs like Orendorff write readable, maintainable, and crash-free multi-threaded programs while also enabling low-level memory control.
Moreover, features like the Cargo package manager also simplify project management and dependency tracking. This adds to an efficient and organized development workflow and a strong ecosystem of open-source libraries.
Popularity Trends: Rust is Climbing the Ranks
The TIOBE Index, which tracks language popularity based on search engine queries, shows Rust reaching its highest position ever in February 2025 at #13.
The popularity graph is a clear sign of the sustained and growing interest in Rust within the broader developer community. While the May 2025 TIOBE index places Rust at #19 with a rating of 0.94%, the overall trend points towards increasing relevance.
Another reliable marker, GitHub's annual State of the Octoverse report, also consistently highlights Rust's growth. While the 2023 report noted Rust growing at 40% year over year, the 2024 Octoverse report again touches upon Rust's gaining traction, thanks to its performance and security features.
Rust in the Ecosystem: Beyond Systems Programming
Thanks to its exceptional performance, inherent memory safety (without a garbage collector), and robust concurrency, Rust has become a go-to solution for a wide spectrum of critical applications.
Let’s see where Rust is used according to the Rust usage statistics:
- Systems programming: Major tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are increasingly using Rust for critical systems components. This includes operating system development (with Rust now in the Linux kernel), browser development, and low-level Windows components.
- Cloud infrastructure and web services: Rust is being adopted for building performant and secure cloud infrastructure. AWS, for instance, developed Firecracker, its microVM technology, entirely in Rust.
- WebAssembly (WASM): Rust is a popular language for WebAssembly as it enables high-performance applications in the browser and beyond. Companies like Figma and Shopify utilize Rust for WASM. The 2024 State of Rust survey showed significant interest in targeting WebAssembly, with 23% targeting it in the browser.
- Embedded systems: There's a slight uptick in users targeting embedded platforms, where Rust's safety and performance are highly valued. Rust can directly access hardware and memory, which makes it great for embedded systems and bare-metal development.
- Command-line interfaces (CLIs): Rust's ability to produce fast, single-binary applications makes it excellent for CLI tools like felix, gptman, and hyperfine.
- Cryptocurrency and blockchain: Rust’s speed, memory management, and security make it a strong choice for cryptocurrency and blockchain development. Projects like Polkadot already use Rust for core infrastructure.
The top reason employers invested in Rust in 2024 was the ability to build relatively correct and bug-free software (87.1%), followed by its performance (84.5%).
The Developers Writing Rust: Growing in Experience and Professional Use
The Rust developer base is becoming more experienced and increasingly uses Rust in professional settings.
- 38% of developers use Rust for the majority of their coding at work, up from 34% the previous year. Moreover, 45% stated their organization makes non-trivial use of Rust, a 7 percentage point increase from 2023.
- 53% of respondents in the 2024 State of Rust Survey considered themselves productive using Rust, up from 47% in 2023.
- Linux remains the most popular choice for Rust development environments, followed by macOS and Windows. Linux is also the most popular target for Rust applications.
- Most users learn Rust from official documentation like The Rust Programming Language book and by reading the source code of Rust crates.
- Visual Studio Code is the most popular editor, though its share dropped slightly with the Rust-built Zed editor gaining traction.
- Rust devs also earn well. The average Rust developer makes around $118,917 per annum, with some roles reaching almost $200,000.
Rust for Web Scraping
Since Rust can compile to native code, it finds use in large-scale scraping tasks that involve processing numerous pages or a lot of data.
Reqwest is a popular and powerful HTTP client for making web requests, akin to Python's requests library. The scraper crate is widely used for parsing HTML content; it gives you an API for manipulating HTML documents using CSS selectors.
Rust web scraping for more complex scenarios involving JavaScript-rendered content can leverage browser automation. Libraries like thirtyfour (Selenium bindings) or fantoccini let developers control browsers programmatically.
Tokio is also an essential asynchronous runtime in Rust with support for non-blocking, concurrent operations that improve the efficiency of web scraping by handling multiple HTTP requests simultaneously.
What's Next for Rust?
Rust popularity continues to grow with a strong focus on its core principles of safety, speed, and concurrency. In the near future, the demand for Rust developers is expected to grow.
Although challenges like the perceived difficulty of the language and compilation time remain, the strong community, dependable tooling (like Cargo and crates.io), and clear benefits in performance and security position Rust for continued growth and wider adoption in 2025 and beyond.
Frequent Questions
What is Rust used for the most?
Rust is mostly used for systems programming. It’s also built for performance and safety, especially around memory management, without relying on garbage collection. That makes it a top choice for building things like operating systems, game engines, browser components (like parts of Firefox), and even blockchain nodes.
Why is Rust so popular right now?
Rust has topped Stack Overflow’s “most admired language” survey for several years in a row. Developers like that Rust makes them feel confident about their code, because the compiler catches entire categories of bugs early. Once you get over the learning curve, it’s surprisingly productive for a systems-level language.
Is Rust being used in production by major companies?
Yes. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Dropbox, Discord, and Cloudflare all use Rust in production. Meta is investing in Rust for backend infrastructure, and the Linux kernel is gradually introducing Rust for safer module development.
Rust’s adoption is caused by real needs: eliminating memory safety issues, improving performance, and enabling safer concurrency.