Programming in Rust is Fun - But Challenging, Finds Annual Community Survey

Respondents to the annual survey of the Rust community reported an uptick in weekly usage and challenges, writes InfoWorld:

Among those surveyed who are using Rust, 81% were using the language on at least a weekly basis, compared to 72% in last year’s survey. Of all Rust users, 75% said they are able to write production-ready code but 27% said it was at times a struggle to write useful, production-ready code… While the survey pointed toward a growing, healthy community of “Rustaceans,” it also found challenges. In particular, Rust users would like to see improvements in compile times, disk usage, debugging, and GUI development…

  • For those who adopted Rust at work, 83% found it “challenging.” But it was unclear how much of this was a Rust-specific issue or general challenges posed by adopting a new language. During adoption, only 13% of respondents believed the language was slowing their team down while 82% believed Rust helped their teams achieve their goals.

  • Of the respondents using Rust, 59% use it at least occasionally at work and 23% use it for the majority of their coding. Last year, only 42% used Rust at work.
    From the survey’s results:After adoption, the costs seem to be justified: only 1% of respondents did not find the challenge worth it while 79% said it definitely was. When asked if their teams were likely to use Rust again in the future, 90% agreed. Finally, of respondents using Rust at work, 89% of respondents said their teams found it fun and enjoyable to program.

As for why respondents are using Rust at work, the top answer was that it allowed users “to build relatively correct and bug free software” with 96% of respondents agreeing with that statement. After correctness, performance (92%) was the next most popular choice. 89% of respondents agreed that they picked Rust at work because of Rust’s much-discussed security properties.

Overall, Rust seems to be a language ready for the challenges of production, with only 3% of respondents saying that Rust was a “risky” choice for production use.
Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for submitting the story…

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