I think contributing to the popularity here is that Rust is interesting to discuss out of an academic perspective due to the niche it has carved out, with the c

I think contributing to the popularity here is that Rust is interesting to discuss out of an academic perspective due to the niche it has carved out, with the compiler able to see already at compile time whether your code is thread safe with no race conditions, and without memory leaks and buffer overruns. This without support like a garbage collector or a virtual machine overseeing things. OK, it's not bullet proof, but large swathes of issues are prevented that often aren't in other big languages, and you kind of have to go out of your way to shoot yourself in the foot. As for use in the industry, I see it mentioned every now and then and I keep being surprised because I have low expectations of its adoption, but then suddenly there are big things like Dropbox rewriting their synchronization core (Nucleus) in Rust, and Microsoft releasing Rust bindings for their next-gen Windows API (WinRT). So I guess it's still rare in the very large realm of software development, but probably more popular than one may expect for a bit of a fringe language. One that I first thought would remain a proof of concept and point of discussion in computer science circles. I'm happy to be wrong because I think it does solve some long standing problems in certain projects.