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I found this surprising... 59% of respondents sounds huge! "Rust can now safely be classified as a language used by people in professional settings. Of those r

I found this surprising... 59% of respondents sounds huge! "Rust can now safely be classified as a language used by people in professional settings. Of those respondents using Rust, 59% use it at least occasionally at work with 23% using Rust for the majority of their coding. This is a large increase over last year where only 42% of respondents used Rust at work."

adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
I don't think this is entirely surprising. Rust isn't many people's first language. People who learn it, mostly do because they have become fed up with the unreliability (typically of C). This creates a bias towards people who are more experienced and have more organizational power. Also, language surveys tend to be biased towards power users which can shift the sample significantly. For example, the Julia survey from 2021 only had 25% Windows users, while Julia binaries are something like 70% windows.
- psfried 5y ago
  That's an interesting statistic about Julia. Makes me curious what the stats would be for Rust.
- eminence32 5y ago
  Your comment about people with "more organizational power" may be an accurate reflection of things, but I don't think it's necessary to explain this increase in people using rust at work. It could be that more and more people are using rust for small ad-hoc scripts, which might have been written in python or java before. These small things might not require any organizational approval, but people might be more comfortable now using rust (either because their own skills in the language have improved, or because they feel more comfortable justifying the use of rust, even if they don't need to).
  - pornel 5y ago
    I think that's a genuine use of Rust for Real Work™. For example, Cloudflare went from using Rust for one project 3 years ago, to depending on Rust in core components and using it by default for almost all new development.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Rust isn't many people's first language. Has anyone actually tried to teach/learn Rust as a first programming language? People did it with C++ (and even C) at some point, is Rust that much more problematic? (And the attempt might even inform new convenience features: the proc macro system gives Rust a lot of inherent flexibility there.)
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    People have. In my opinion, it's a bad idea. I think that to appreciate Rust's design, you pretty much have to be familiar with the awfulness of memory leaks in C/C++ (and it helps if you have experience trying to make a program in a GCed language hit strict latency requirements). I think Rust's design is genius, but I think the first language you learn should be an easy language with a GC (there's enough hard parts of learning your first PL). The next step is to learn C (because it's beautiful but fatally flawed), and only after you have learned why manual allocs and frees suck, should you learn Rust.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      The easiest way to conceptualize Rust's design at a basic level (suitable for first-time learners) is probably as a glorified functional language, where you initially pass everything by value (courtesy of .clone()) aside from shared immutable data (passed via shared references). Mutable borrowing can then be introduced next, followed by the "cell" patterns/constructs for shared mutable state. Not altogether trivial, but it seems like it could work. And the compiler would protect against many errors along the way, that bite C/C++ coders.
    - CornCobs 5y ago
      I agree. I think Rust (or at least many tutorials of Rust) paper over ownership as something the compiler deals with for you but I think that's false. You have to think about memory and ownership. Only when I started using C++ where you have to think about the same things but without the static checking do I appreciate the ability to statically check and enforce things like moving and borrowing
    - 5y ago
spenczar5 5y ago
I write a bit of Rust, but not for work, and I never heard about this survey. I think that's probably common - the more Rust you write, the more likely it is that you fill out the survey, so the sample is probably very biased towards people who work with it a lot (ie, professionally). Or - you could describe that as biased, at least. Alternatively, maybe the intent of these language surveys is exactly to find out what committed power-users think. Either way, interpreting results from language surveys is tricky business.
- apendleton 5y ago
  I think it's true that surveys like this will skew towards more serious/dedicated practitioners, but in addition to professionals, the Rust community has also at various times attracted people who were excited about bleeding-edge things, or PLT/type-theory people, etc., and I think this survey probably does show a shift in the user base towards work-a-day users and away from these other groups. (Or more succinctly: the absolute numbers are probably meaningless, but the trends are maybe worth watching.)
- estebank 5y ago
  The self-selection bias effect is why the survey on isolation is not enough to derive meaning on its own. But, looking at the trends over time as the yearly survey is analyzed and compared with the previous ones is useful.

adgjlsfhk1 5y ago

I don't think this is entirely surprising. Rust isn't many people's first language. People who learn it, mostly do because they have become fed up with the unreliability (typically of C). This creates a bias towards people who are more experienced and have more organizational power. Also, language surveys tend to be biased towards power users which can shift the sample significantly. For example, the Julia survey from 2021 only had 25% Windows users, while Julia binaries are something like 70% windows.

psfried 5y ago
That's an interesting statistic about Julia. Makes me curious what the stats would be for Rust.
eminence32 5y ago
Your comment about people with "more organizational power" may be an accurate reflection of things, but I don't think it's necessary to explain this increase in people using rust at work. It could be that more and more people are using rust for small ad-hoc scripts, which might have been written in python or java before. These small things might not require any organizational approval, but people might be more comfortable now using rust (either because their own skills in the language have improved, or because they feel more comfortable justifying the use of rust, even if they don't need to).
- pornel 5y ago
  I think that's a genuine use of Rust for Real Work™. For example, Cloudflare went from using Rust for one project 3 years ago, to depending on Rust in core components and using it by default for almost all new development.
zozbot234 5y ago
> Rust isn't many people's first language. Has anyone actually tried to teach/learn Rust as a first programming language? People did it with C++ (and even C) at some point, is Rust that much more problematic? (And the attempt might even inform new convenience features: the proc macro system gives Rust a lot of inherent flexibility there.)
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  People have. In my opinion, it's a bad idea. I think that to appreciate Rust's design, you pretty much have to be familiar with the awfulness of memory leaks in C/C++ (and it helps if you have experience trying to make a program in a GCed language hit strict latency requirements). I think Rust's design is genius, but I think the first language you learn should be an easy language with a GC (there's enough hard parts of learning your first PL). The next step is to learn C (because it's beautiful but fatally flawed), and only after you have learned why manual allocs and frees suck, should you learn Rust.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    The easiest way to conceptualize Rust's design at a basic level (suitable for first-time learners) is probably as a glorified functional language, where you initially pass everything by value (courtesy of .clone()) aside from shared immutable data (passed via shared references). Mutable borrowing can then be introduced next, followed by the "cell" patterns/constructs for shared mutable state. Not altogether trivial, but it seems like it could work. And the compiler would protect against many errors along the way, that bite C/C++ coders.
  - CornCobs 5y ago
    I agree. I think Rust (or at least many tutorials of Rust) paper over ownership as something the compiler deals with for you but I think that's false. You have to think about memory and ownership. Only when I started using C++ where you have to think about the same things but without the static checking do I appreciate the ability to statically check and enforce things like moving and borrowing
  - 5y ago

spenczar5 5y ago

I write a bit of Rust, but not for work, and I never heard about this survey. I think that's probably common - the more Rust you write, the more likely it is that you fill out the survey, so the sample is probably very biased towards people who work with it a lot (ie, professionally). Or - you could describe that as biased, at least. Alternatively, maybe the intent of these language surveys is exactly to find out what committed power-users think. Either way, interpreting results from language surveys is tricky business.

apendleton 5y ago
I think it's true that surveys like this will skew towards more serious/dedicated practitioners, but in addition to professionals, the Rust community has also at various times attracted people who were excited about bleeding-edge things, or PLT/type-theory people, etc., and I think this survey probably does show a shift in the user base towards work-a-day users and away from these other groups. (Or more succinctly: the absolute numbers are probably meaningless, but the trends are maybe worth watching.)
estebank 5y ago
The self-selection bias effect is why the survey on isolation is not enough to derive meaning on its own. But, looking at the trends over time as the yearly survey is analyzed and compared with the previous ones is useful.