Fun facts about Rust's growing popularity

There are now 100 friends of Rust (Be sure to hover to learn about how each company uses Rust)

There are now 3 Rust podcasts: New Rustacean, Rusty Spike, and Request for Explanation

First year had one conference, the second year had three, and this year had four.

crates.io is not even 3 years old, but already the number of crates has passed CRAN(R) and Hackage(Haskell).

The Rust reddit is now over 29,000 Rustaceans strong.

the #rust irc channel has grown to over 1300 people

The Rust gitter channel is over 1800 people.

our first Rust survey had 3,086 responses. Our second had 5,368 responses, over 2,000 more than the first year.

Rust is a top 10 most discussed project on GitHub.

Rust is a top 10 most reviewed project on GitHub.

Rust is used on hundreds of millions of desktops via Dropbox.

The "impl period" now has at least 37 different teams helping implement new designs.

The popular @code, ranked 5th in this years Stack Overflow survey, powers its code search with ripgrep, a search tool written in Rust.

Atlassian uses Rust in a service for analyzing petabytes of source code.

The new O'Reilly Rust book was the most popular on Safari.

There are over 100 meetups around the world discussing Rust.

npm rewrote performance-critical bottlenecks in the registry service architecture with Rust.

Popular indie game developer Chucklefish recently announced their new game will be written in Rust.

The number of full-time Rust developers continues to grow. Over half are working on large Rust codebases.

Rust was the most loved technology two years in a row in the Stack Overflow survey.

@rustlang has over 24k twitter followers 🎉🎉

367 applicants applied for the 12 spots in the Rust Reach initiative

There are at least 5 Rust books in production, with releases over the next 18 monts.

Red Hat added support for Rust in their recent updates.

IntelliJ officially supports Rust.

Rust's reddit channel hit 100,000 uniques and 1,000,000 views in July

Amazon is hiring for developers with Rust experience.

Google engineers are experimenting with Rust for low-level system modules.

The official Rust YouTube channel has over 90 videos on Rust.

Android Rust development grew 10x in 2017 (to 9.9% of devs).

iOS Rust development grew 10x in 2017 (to 5.3% of devs).

Rust has seen slow, steady growth in commercial usage. Now over 20% of Rust devs use it at work.

More than 75% of respondents said they feel comfortable in the Rust community, which includes even non-users of Rust.

Rust attracts about 18%, or roughly 1/5th, of its userbase in new users every month.

The number of Rust devs with more than a year of experience grew to 42% in the last year. That's a lot of experience!

More than 2% of all Rust devs work on Rust codebases totalling more than 100k lines of code.

A growing number of Rust devs use Windows, which now makes up over 30% of all Rust users.

This year we saw a huge increase, at 16% of responses, in the amount and style of documentation requested to cover more learning styles

This year we also saw a shift in non-user reasons to be companies don't use it. More folks now would learn it if it can pay the bills.

Speaking of module counts, at 16/day Rust is the 7th fastest growing package repo.

The Rust internal forum is a hotbed of activity, with popular posts regularly getting over 10k views.

A growing number of GNOME developers are using Rust, with ports underway for some important libraries

Rust and GNOME teams have had one hackfest with another next month

Though early days, we're seeing more Rust support in the gstreamer media playback framework.

Canonical uses Rust in everything from server monitoring to middleware.

Lots of System 76 tools and systems code are written in Rust.

Principal Intel engineers are encouraging people to learn Rust.

Facebook wrote a mercurial server in Rust.

Facebook is also a sponsor for Rust Belt Rust.

Over 2000 people have contributed to Rust.

The github repo has also gotten over 24k stars, making it one of the most popular programming language repos.

Not to be missed, even the Rust book repo had over 180 contributors.

Rust first shipped in Firefox 48, almost a year and a half ago.

Rust is now used in five different modules in Firefox, with the next release having a new style system written in Rust.

Rust Bridge continues to be a good outreach to underrepresented developers, now having its 7th(?) event at this week's Rust Belt Rust

Rust is supported by 11 regular subteams and 3 shepherd teams that help mentor and lead discussion

Staff engineer at Tumblr mentions that Tumblr is using Rust.

Rust is just behind Scala in active github projects (this month: 1263 vs 1376)

If you haven't seen them yet, the Mozilla Hacks videos are some of Rust's most popular (with one over 50k views)

Also in the survey, 16.8% of Rust devs are doing embedded work.

Jorge Aparacio has been a long-time supporter for embedded and is writing a book for embedded Rust development.

Rust got mentioned in a Batgirl comic.

The new Chucklefish game is not the first in Rust. An even earlier game was Shar.

Between Rust's first and second year, 56 RFCs were merged.

In the last ~3 months, 36 RFCs were merged.

Rust has had over 45 releases. Many since 1.0 have been well-received in programming news circles.

Another published Rust game is a Snake's Tale

Speaking of popular posts, one Rust project, alacritty, received over 1000 points on Hacker News.

crates.io has had over 240,000,000 downloads

standard Rust tools are voted/promoted by the community. RLS, rustfmt, clippy, and rustup each have over 1000 stars on GitHub.

for a bit of history, here's a post that helped start it all. To this day, still a regularly referenced post.

Ever wonder about the en-US at the end of https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/ ? The Rust homepage is in 13 different languages!

Language interop is an important piece of Rust's growth. We have C++ interop with bindgen.

There's also node.js interop with Neon.

There's good Ruby/Rust interop with Helix and others

Python and Rust also have on-going interop work.

In addition to interop, Rust has been an influence on Swift.

Rust's focus on memory safety without performance loss has helped other languages as well, including D.

Rust has also been inspired by other languages, including a revamp of errors inspired by Elm.

Rust has also grown from a wide range of influences, including discussions with top language designers.

Rust's 1st job was on creating browser tech. In making Servo, Rust focused on both safety and speed, w/o one excluding the other.

Rust focuses on productivity also, leaning on ergonomics for getting more done with fewer language rough edges.

IEEE lists Rust as the 22nd most popular programming language.

This year, according to Redmonk, Rust jumped from 47th to 26th most popular programming language.

Likewise, Google trends shows Rust with (albeit a little noisy) comfortable growth over the last 5 years.

Rust is global, with heavy growth in the United States and Europe. These are the meetup locations worldwide.

Google trends also shows strong activity recently in parts of Asia.

Just noticed the Rust reddit has had 16 posts in the last 24 hours. Not bad!

Rust just isn't a lang, but a community as well, with a focus on helpfulness. Growing this is also important.

In addition to community, Rust-focused contractors like Integer 32 and Asquera have sprung up.

Speaking of, there are a number of trainers available for Rust. The Rust community team can help connect you.

If you can make it out to one of the conferences, there are great hands-on labs there as well.

We've seen through multiple surveys that people stick around once they get used to Rust. It's a joy to watch.

I forgot to mention, there's also an unofficial Rust slack channel.

As well as an unofficial discord server for Rust discussions.

Rust is used commercially in a wide range of areas, incl. embedded systems, a/v transcoding, servers, and more.

The "impl period" is a reaction to Rust's growth. Discussions were at such a high volume that focus was needed.

The Rust team at Mozilla is spread across three continents, with most hosting meetups/talks.

Speaking of meetups, if you ever have a chance to go, check out the SF Rust meetup. Lots of great talks/ideas (also free pizza!)

A core piece of Rust's growth is a sense of courtesy. This comes from the code of conduct.

Rust is growing into new areas. Recently, there's been a focus on WASM support, with new tools like wargo

Anecdotally, I can say that I see new faces on Rust twitter regularly. More people are getting excited and sharing their adventures.

A big feature for commercial adoption just landed in cargo: alternative registries.

The Rust community has its own poet that writes limericks on the news, including yours truly. 😅

Another fun survey fact: despite more users and releases every 6 weeks, only ~7% of users had upgrade breakage.

Lin Clark, who makes awesome code cartoons, wrote a popular one on the upcoming Firefox style system rewrite.

Also, speaking of, there was a followup article on WebRender, another upcoming update to Firefox rendering.

While some may see Rust as largely Mozilla-driven, the Rust core team is actually made of folks from four different companies.

On a personal note, I've been pleasantly surprised that each Rusty Spike episode has gotten over 500 listens, even though it's new.

This is the place-holder for a lot of stuff we can't talk about being done by companies you might know. Wish we could talk about it!

Outreach to companies is exclusively grass roots by engineers in those companies promoting Rust and asking people to present.

Rust is growing in importance in infosec. Projects like Tor have already begun moving code to Rust.

Awesome Rust is well worth a shout-out. If you ever wonder about what's good in the Rust world, check it out.