Rust programming language: difficulties, trends and feature requests

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The latest Rust Survey was conducted in December 2024 and the results of the community survey are now available: According to the survey, Rust developers use Rust more frequently in their work environment, can demonstrate more extensive expertise and prefer to use the latest stable release. The increasing complexity of the programming language remains one of their most important concerns for the future –, although they are apparently still able to cope with the current complexity.

Growing Rust expertise and increasing use in professional life

According to the study, knowledge of Rust is slowly increasing. In 2023, 47 percent of respondents said they could work productively with Rust – now it is already 53.5 percent. The answer of being able to write production-ready code only with difficulty was selected by 24.9% this time, compared to 28.2% in the previous year.

More than half of developers use Rust daily or almost daily – an increasing trend since 2022. From this, the study team concludes that Rust is probably being used more frequently in working life. This also seems to be confirmed by more specific questions, as 38.2 percent of developers state that they use Rust at work for their main programming. This is also a continuously increasing trend, which once started at 29.8 percent in 2022.

Challenges and desired features

When asked about the most difficult aspects of Rust, slow compilation comes first. A quarter of respondents criticized this. A suboptimal debugging experience and high memory requirements –, for example for the target folder –, are the other most frequently mentioned difficulties.

Among the currently non-existent or unstable features, the Rust developers are most looking forward to Async Closures. The Rust team has good news here, as they are set to reach stable status in the upcoming version 1.85. Soon after, the second most requested feature, if/while let chains, should also be stabilized.

Complexity remains a major concern

What does the community actually think of the development speed of the programming language? The survey team also found out. According to the survey, 58 percent of respondents are satisfied with the evolution of Rust, while around a quarter would like to see an acceleration in the development of new features and their stabilization. Indifference is expressed by 6.6 percent, while four percent are of the opinion that Rust is already too complex and should neither add nor stabilize significant features.

Complexity was a key concern of respondents in both the last and penultimate editions of the survey, and this time too: 45.2% have this concern about the future of Rust, putting it in second place. As the study authors note, this contrasts with the answers to the previous question. They therefore assume that Rust users currently find the complexity bearable, but fear that it will continue to increase.

The number one concern for the future (multiple answers possible) is the insufficient use of Rust in the tech industry with 45.5%. Insufficient support from developers and maintainers is seen as a major problem by 35.4% (3rd place), while 22.8% believe that project governance does not meet requirements (4th place) and 21.1% criticize insufficient support for the Rust project from the Rust Foundation (5th place).

In contrast, 18.6 percent of respondents had no concerns –, a slight increase on last year's figure of 17.8 percent. This answer lands in sixth place.

Other findings of the study include the fact that Rust developers predominantly use Linux and that Rust is most frequently used in server-side or back-end applications in the work environment. The most commonly used Rust version is the latest stable release, which is either the most recent or the one offered with the Linux distribution used.

Over 7300 developers took part

This time, 7310 developers responded to the Rust survey team's full questionnaire, mainly from the USA (22 percent), Germany (14 percent) and the UK (6 percent). The survey team explains the lower number of people compared to the last edition (9710 people) by the fact that participation was only possible for two weeks instead of just under a month as in the previous year.

All other results of the "2024 State of Rust Survey" are available on the Rust blog and in a detailed 56-page analysis.

(mai)