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Results of Rust Survey 2016 – early draft for internal usage
- EvgeniyZh 10y agoWow, ~180 people with projects more than 100000 lines.
- krasin 10y agoAll / most of them are likely Servo contributors. Servo: https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/
- cmrx64 10y agoOr rustc/libstd.
- timlyo 10y agoI think redox might be larger as well http://www.redox-os.org/ http://www.redox-os.org/
- tomaka 10y ago100k may seem like a lot, but if I do the sum of all lines of codes (exluding blank lines and comments) of the Rust projects where I'm the only contributor (or where other contributors are minor) I'm at around 61k lines of code. Lines of code go up quicker than you think.
- willvarfar 10y agoThe first diagram shows that 35.5% of respondents don't use, or stopped using, rust. Its a shame they don't break this down between those who have never used it vs those who have stopped using it. At the end of the results there's talk about why those who don't use rust don't use it, but again it doesn't separate out why people have never used it vs why people have stopped using it. I imagine it would be a very interesting to have had this split.
- Manishearth 10y agoNote that we tried to publicize the survey amongst non-Rustaceans, so I expect most of these respondents are those who never used it in the first place. We got an overwhelming positive response, especially in the freeform comments. There's also: > Equally encouraging is seeing that once someone has become a Rust user, they tend to stick around and continue using it. One might expect a sharp drop-off if users became quickly disenchanted and moved onto other technologies. Instead, we see the opposite. Users that come in and stay past their initial experiences tend to stay long-term, with a fairly even spread between 3 months to 12 months (when we first went 1.0).
- akerro 10y agoThanks for your work guys. I took part in the survey when I found it on Reddit. Yesterday I started my first project in two new technologies, Rust and GTK. That's completely different experience and perspective of designing code after years of C++(Qt) and Java(backend). Now I wish I was earlier adopter :)
- Manishearth 10y agoThank you! I'd love to hear more about your experience, though perhaps once you have worked a bit more on the project :) Eh, early adoption is overrated -- you have to fight through lack of docs, lack of libraries, and general ecosystem issues, all while the language keeps changing underneath you :P (Note that not everyone who works on Rust; or even who worked on this survey, is a guy)
- fiedzia 10y agoNote that many people use the term "guy" without relation to sex or even being a person.
- Manishearth 10y agoI know. I'm not questioning the intention, I'm requesting the term not be used that way -- it is known to alienate people.
- eximius 10y agoHmmm. That 20% of Rust users identify as part of an 'underrepresented group' does not seem like poor number. I would naively guess that it is a larger percentage than exists in the overall technical population. If that's correct, then bravo Rust! (If anyone knows about numbers along those lines, I'd love to hear about it.)
- itxifxuf 10y agoAmazing how a bigger focus is placed on getting certain demographics to use a programming language rather than focusing on improvement of the language itself.
- maggit 10y agoWhere did you get "bigger focus" from? It seems to me they are hard at work improving the language all the time.
- itxifxuf 10y agoProgramming languages are for programming, not capturing token demographics. This shouldn't even be a consideration.
- Perceptes 10y agoProgramming languages are used for and by humans. The experience of the people using the language plays a massive role in the success of the language and of the software built with it.
- itxifxuf 10y agoSo why are we needlessly injecting race and sexual orientation into something that used to be just about programming? Are we tracking the demographics for lawn sprinkler users with equally bated breath? Stop trying to insert your identity politics into everything. Let's just leave a few pure things in this world, please.
- lbn 10y agoHow come there are as many women (47) answering this survey as trans people? Is there anything in the Rust community that is hostile to women but not trans people? In fact trans people appear to be over-represented in this survey as 1.7% of people in it were trans compared to optimistic 0.3% of the US being transgender [0] [0] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-US-population-identify-as-transgender https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-US-population-i...
- k__ 10y agoMost female devs I know are trans women. So maybe they are over-represented in the dev-world in general?
- viraptor 10y agoHostile may be jumping to conclusions. It's a small number, and it's a self-selected sample. Small change in any of the numbers will result in big ratio change. Unless someone actually claims hostile behaviour, why expect it? Either way, the trans population is very much overrepresented in the survey. You took one of the sources from the link which claims 0.3%. The next source which I would trust (DSM-5 stats) claims 0.005-0.014% natal male and 0.002-0.003% natal female for gender dysphoria.
- lbn 10y agoThe reason I said hostile is that in most discussions on Hacker News and Reddit a lot of people argue that the only reason women are so under-represented in tech is that all the guys are very hostile to women. This survey goes against that. For some reason they refuse to believe that some things are more interesting to women than men and vice versa.
- viraptor 10y ago> For some reason they refuse to believe that some things are more interesting to women than men and vice versa. It could be that this is just as wrong as the "only hostility is the problem". Not everybody sees the same barriers. Not everyone faces the same challenges. We don't even know if/what's more interesting, because we're bombarded with ideas of what should be more interesting since very young age. Software engineers I know successfully raise girl geeks for example.
- qznc 10y ago> By large margin, users are often grabbing vim to do their Rust work in I would rather assume the reverse theory. Vim users are more likely to use new languages since they don't expect complex IDE support. Or maybe just: Early adopter and vim user correlates.
- allan_s 10y ago(disclaimer: I'm a vim user) Also maybe because rust and vim appeal to the same argument of "performance/only come with the stuff you need"
- kevincox 10y agoTo be fair. With YouCompleteMe and rust-racer support the tooling for Rust in vim is solid.
- qznc 10y agoThat is only completion? IDEs provide more. Refactoring and Debugging, for example. (I'm a vimmer myself, but that is what I hear other people complain about)
- Argorak 10y agoSure, but you have to start somewhere. With the internal representations of Rust still being changing almost weekly, transformational tasks are a chore. Debugging is shipped through Rust support in gdb and rust-gdb, so it is coming. That's the thing about Rust: there's always lots of stuff that is close. We prefer solid over half-baked, and try not to advertise stuff in flight to much.
- weberc2 10y agoI disagree. I'm used to vim-go, and the difference between that and YCM + rust-racer is stark. Rust really needs to catch up here before it can get a larger share of my hobby time.
- panic 10y agoAccording to the survey, ~16% of people experience breakage with minor upgrades. Isn't this a pretty serious violation of semver?
- jjnoakes 10y agoI don't know the details in rust's case, but I wouldn't consider it a violation of semver if the code which broke in a minor update was doing bad things (maybe accidentally exploiting a bug or limitation in the language or implementation, probably by violating some requirement that wasn't checked properly, etc) and simply couldn't be correct code if left alone.
- panic 10y agoHow do you define a "bad thing"? The semver spec is quite clear about "even the tiniest backwards incompatible changes" (http://semver.org/#if-even-the-tiniest-backwards-incompatible-changes-to-the-public-api-require-a-major-version-bump-wont-i-end-up-at-version-4200-very-rapidly http://semver.org/#if-even-the-tiniest-backwards-incompatibl...) requiring a major version bump.
- Manishearth 10y agoRust has its own definition of what it defines to be stable. Soundness fixes and bug fixes do not count, though as much as possible they will try to fix them in a way that breaks very little. http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014/10/30/Stability.html
- lifthrasiir 10y agoCargo does not (yet) ensure that the library maintainer did follow the semver's doctrine.
- Argorak 10y agoBut there are people working on it. https://github.com/semantic-rs https://github.com/semantic-rs
- desdiv 10y ago48.8% of Rust users use nightly, 23 percentage points among them use both stable and nightly, which means 25.8% of Rust users use only nightly. Is it just me or does that seem exceedingly high? I'm guessing that a good deal of them are Rust language/core lib developers?
- progval 10y agoI personnally use nightly without being a core dev, because Rust is not available in Debian Stable so I just compile it from Git.
- dmit 10y agoAlso a factor is that there are very useful libraries that either can only be used in nightly, or are more ergonomic to use in nightly. Usually because they rely on compiler internals or unstable language features. This is mentioned as one of the points under "Challenges for Rust".
- cmrx64 10y agoI use nightly for osdev. No other option.
- Argorak 10y agoPlease note that this is a leak of an early draft for the rust community teams internal usage and should be marked as such. Do consider all numbers undiscussed and not cleaned up for flaws (we'll document the cleanups and the reasonings). -- Florian // rust-community team
- progval 10y agoSorry, I saw it on IRC and didn't know it wasn't supposed to be public
- Manishearth 10y agoWe do most of our work in public, so it is public, just not intended for distribution :) (In the case of the survey the analysis itself was conducted privately, because the data contains personally identifying information. But usually things are done in the public.)
- Argorak 10y agoHappens, I see the need to clarify a bit around #rust-community there :). No harm done.
- dang 10y agoWe added that to the title and buried the submission. One thing we've learned over the years is that it's fine to wait until a story is actually ready before discussing it.
- akavel 10y agoTo author: would it be possible to improve the bar graphs, so that they were sorted by value, not by label? I believe it would make reading them much easier, and make them more informative [or, "deobfuscate" them]. (I mean those like "editors", etc., not "how long I know Rust" where the labels introduce sensible order.)
- jntrnr 10y agoAuthor here. Hi all - thanks for the interest in the survey! The Rust community team is still working the blog post (this link was to an early draft), and we're looking forward to posting it when it's done.
- epoch1970 10y agoI think this survey was very poorly publicized. As somebody who only dabbles in Rust, this is the first I have heard of this survey. I am sure that others are in the same boat as I am. We would have participated, but we learned about it weeks after it closed! Only now do I see the blog article, and a submission here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11661056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11661056] that got no traction. I don't remember seeing any sort of a notice on the main Rust web site. The fact that many participants were excluded, albeit unintentionally, makes me really question the completeness, and hence the validity and usefulness, of this survey data.
- Argorak 10y agoThis survey was publicized in all official channels including this week in rust, mentioned in the 1 year of rust announcement, on Hacker News (we cannot control traction), on the subreddit, the users forum, our Twitter account (where it also got huge traction) and literally all our other venues. We got a huge amount of replies. I'm not sure how this is "poorly publicized".
- epoch1970 10y agoWhy was a link apparently not in the most obvious place, on the https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ web site? A small notice across the top would not have been disruptive, yet I and others would have seen it.
- kibwen 10y agoWe put a great deal of effort into publicizing the survey, with a special focus on public spaces and piggybacking on highly-visible announcements. The website's front page sees less traffic than e.g. HN or the Rust subreddit, so it's not hard to imagine why nobody considered putting it there. It certainly wouldn't have hurt to have had it there, and I'm sure we'll consider putting it there for next year's survey, but we're quite happy with the several thousand respondents that we received.
- cesarb 10y agoThis link is asking for a login. Is there anywhere one can read the results without creating an account?
- Manishearth 10y agoThis was a draft blog post intended for review which was posted on HN, and has been made private for now.
- nutheracc 10y agoThe link is now locked. Can we replace it with something interesting? Or a cached copy?
- steveklabnik 10y agoThere will be some kind of actual communication of this data at some point, quite possibly on the official Rust blog. This was a rough draft of the post that was leaked.
- logingone 10y agoYes, put something interesting in its place please, rust-related.
- themihai 10y agoIs it just me or the doc requires permission?
- steveklabnik 10y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11960483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11960483
- dang 10y agoWe've closed this thread to new accounts because new accounts have taken it into the weeds of angry troll war.