Rust Survey 2021 Results
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Rust Survey 2021 Results
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Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#2I 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."
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#3I 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."
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.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#4I 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."
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 fro…
That's an interesting statistic about Julia. Makes me curious what the stats would be for Rust.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#5I 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."
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 fro…
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).
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#6I'm definitely in the camp that worry about the feature/complexity creep. I saw it with Haskell. Haskell 98 is a pretty nice and simple language. GHC Haskell is a monster. This matters when you try to read other people code and the overuse of experimental cool new features becomes a major burden for comprehension.
Rust is already a very large language and for intrinsic reasons pile on a load more complexity than Haskell (just look at the iterators).
I write this as a fan and advocate of Rust.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#7I'm definitely in the camp that worry about the feature/complexity creep. I saw it with Haskell. Haskell 98 is a pretty nice and simple language. GHC Haskell is a monster. This matters when you try to read other people code and the overuse of experimental cool new features becomes a major burden for comprehension. Rust is already a very large language and for intrinsic reasons pile on a load more complexity than Hask…
I feel like the pace of Rust language evolution slowed down significantly after the 2018 edition and the work on async shortly thereafter. Most of the more recent language changes feel like pretty minor ergonomic improvements, things which always should have worked. I suppose we got const functions (can be evaluated at compile time), and const generics (allow you define fixed-length vectors for size N). But those features are well established in other languages and they don't interact much with anything else. And I'm sure I'm forgetting a few things, but that's sort of my point—subjectively, not a lot has changed for me recently.
What I have seen is a lot of good work in the larger ecosystem. And the tooling continues to improve.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#8I'm definitely in the camp that worry about the feature/complexity creep. I saw it with Haskell. Haskell 98 is a pretty nice and simple language. GHC Haskell is a monster. This matters when you try to read other people code and the overuse of experimental cool new features becomes a major burden for comprehension. Rust is already a very large language and for intrinsic reasons pile on a load more complexity than Hask…
No worries, Rust has a looong way to go before they reach C++ levels. And the editions system even makes it feasible to pursue some ex-post simplification, though that requires a number of years to complete and cross-linking across editions must be preserved regardless.
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#9I 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."
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 fro…
> 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.)
Re: Rust Survey 2021 Results
#10I'm definitely in the camp that worry about the feature/complexity creep. I saw it with Haskell. Haskell 98 is a pretty nice and simple language. GHC Haskell is a monster. This matters when you try to read other people code and the overuse of experimental cool new features becomes a major burden for comprehension. Rust is already a very large language and for intrinsic reasons pile on a load more complexity than Hask…
Alas I had fun with rust and made some small apps but as I got deeper I just got scared off by the learning curve. I'm kind of over the hump with c++, javascript and python and I just couldn't do it again. Maybe I will revisit in a few years if it actually slows down.