Rust social status update 2024.12

popularity

While the technical capabilities of a programming language are very important, the social acceptance of the language also has a huge impact on ecosystem around the language.

It is also a good (or at least reasonable) measurement of the popularity of the language.

The Rust user groups page was updated exactly 6 months ago so today, December 17 is the day I share the new report.

The report on 2024.06.17.

Rust User Groups

There are mostly Meetup groups in the list, though some use different platforms. In some cases the number of members cannot be determined.

Overall:

date no. groups members change
2023.12.11 99 59,629
2024.03.17 113 65,200 5,571
2024.06.17 116 68,126 2,926
2024.12.17 132 77,688 9,562

In the last 6 monthes the number of members grew by 14%. Thats over 30% annually.

In the previous 3 month the growth was 4.4% or roughly 20% annually.

The three largest Rust groups are the Rust London User Group (3,357), Rust NYC (3,192), and Rust Berlin (3,123).

These are also the only groups with more than 3,000 members.

My Code-Mavens group has 3,213. I use it to organize virtual events in English about Rust, Python, and Perl. I did not include it in the list.

Since the previous report the Rust in Israel group I created gained 200 members, but then a few weeks ago I inherited the Rust Tel Aviv group with 950 and asked all the people to move over. It now has 1,011 members.

For full details, see of Rust User Groups.

I update the figures in several commit that will allow someone to check the changes more easily. Here are the commits.

action no. groups members commit
Before 116 68,126
Update members removed closed groups 107 71,116 commit
Add group I did not know about earlier 132 77,688 commit
Sort groups 132 77,688 commit

Rust on LinkedIn

group 2024.04.08 2024.06.17 change (2 months) 2024.12.17 change (6 month)
Rust Programming Language 23,261 24,139 3.7 % 26,186 8.4%
Rust Developer Community (Rust Lang) 3,668 4,048 10.3 % 5,068 25.1%
Rust Developers 1,311 1,365 4.1 % 1,455 6.5%
Rust (Programming Language) 1,308 1,489 13.8 % 2,025 35.9%

Rust on LinkedIn

Rust on Facebook

Group 2024.04.08 2024.07.19 change 2024.12.17
Rust Developers (inactive) 8.8K 9.0K 2.27% 9.5K
Rust Programming Language 3.0K 3.4K 13% 4.1K
Rust-lang.tw 2.5K 2.6K 4% 2.7K
Programming Rust 1.9K 2.0K 5% 2.3K
Rust Developers Vietnam 1.8K 2.2K 22% 2.7K

The first group listed is inactive, but still people become members.

Full report on Rust on Facebook

Rust on Reddit

Subredit members

subredit 2024.04.08 2024.06.19 change (2 month) 2024.12.16 change (6 month)
/r/rust 286K 297K 3.8% 325K 9.4%
/r/learnrust 25K 27K 8% 32K 18.5%
/r/rust_gamedev 38K 38K 40K 5.2%

The 3.8% increase in 2 months is roughly 25% annually. Very nice.

The 8% increase in 2 months is, what, 55% a year? I did not compute it, but also there might be some extreme rounding error as we only have the numbers in thousands so the real change is somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 members.

The scary part is that on the Gamedev both the number of subscribers as the number of people currently online were the same as 2 months ago.

See Rust on Reddit

X Twitter

Followers

account 2024.01.06 2024.06.19 2024.12.16
Rustlang 136.9K 143.9K 148.9K
Mara Bos 41.3K 43.3K 44.7K
rust_foundation 35.6K 37.7K 39.0K
RustTrending 29.5K 32.4K 34.8K
ThisWeekInRust 31.9K 32.3K 32.3K
RustConf 15.3K 16.4K 17.4K
rust_analyzer 13.5K 13.5K 13.1K
rustembedded 11.2K 11.9K 12.3K
tokio_rs 11.6K 11.8K 11.6K
SurrealDB 7,498 8,345 8,524
RustFest 7,825 7,742 7,505
rustjobs_dev 4,499 5,568 6,035
crates.io status 5.039 5,543 5,665
RustSecurity 3,964 4,611 3,885
rustlab_conf 3,816 4,163 4,674
AstraKernel 1,925 3,611 4,436
Orhun Parmaksız 3,336 4,200
RustDiscussions 2,549 3,285 3,808
RustNationUK 2,157 2,738 3,215
RustLondon_ 2,522 2,699 2,838
euro_rust 2,201 2,503 2,915
letsgetrusty 1,418 2,387 3,029
rustoftheday 482 1,513 1,806
ratatui_rs 79 839 1,586
RustMaven 1 48 31

Orhun Parmaksız is the maintainer of Ratatui.rs

Instagram

2023.12.07

account posts followers following
rust_programming_language 12 2,374 16
rustlanguage 7 1,223 0
rustacean.dev 14 576 9
rust_language_ 19 283 434
rust_lang_ 1 75 6
Rust Maven on Instagram 0 3 0

2024.06.19

account posts followers following
rust_programming_language 21 2,709 5
rustlanguage 7 1,245 1
rustacean.dev 14 624 9
rust_language_ 19 330 434
rust_lang_ 1 93 6
Rust Maven on Instagram 34 64 6

2024.12.16

account posts followers following
rust_programming_language 24 4,203 3
rustlanguage 7 1,273 1
rustacean.dev 14 652 9
rust_language_ 19 335 432
rust_lang_ 1 100 6
Rust Maven on Instagram 36 59 6

Rust on Telegram

There might be other groups, but I am not aware of them and I've just created the Rust Maven telegram group so let me put it here:

Number of members.

group 2024.06.19 2024.12.16
Rust Maven 0 16

And you are invited to join!

If you know of other groups, let me know so I can list them here.

WhatsApp

Are there any Rust groups on WhatsApp that you would like me to include in my report?

The popularity of Rust

The Stack Overflow survey 2024 indicates that Rust is the most admired language by a large gap at 82.2% (the next is Elixir at 76.8%). That is a lot of people love Rust. However this gap was much bigger last year.

On the other hand it is only 6th most desired language with 28.7%. Ahead of it are SQL and HTML/CSS that are, well, different. Also TypeScript, Python, and JavaScript. As I understand this indicates how many job openings are.

In a nutshell, this seem to indicate that many people will want to use Rust, but the number of open positions are relatively low.

However, being on the 6th place is also extremely good.

PYPL - PopularitY of Programming Language

Indicates that Rust is number 9 with 2.66% share and +0.5% 1-year trend. (up from number 10 six months ago)

Python is number 1 with 29.71% share and 1.5% 1-year trend.

C/C++ (bundled together) is number 4 with 7.06% with 0.3% 1-year trend. (up from number 5 six months ago)

TIOBE

Rust is number 14 (up from number 18 a year ago) with 1.29% ratings and +0.48% change.

Python is number 1 with 23.84% ratings and +9.98% change.

C++ is number 2 with 10.82% ratings and 0.81% change.

Java is number 3 with 9.72% ratings and 1.73% change.

C is number 4 with 9.10% ratings and -2.34% change.

Author

Gabor Szabo (szabgab)

Gabor Szabo, the author of the Rust Maven web site maintains several Open source projects in Rust and while he still feels he has tons of new things to learn about Rust he already offers training courses in Rust and still teaches Python, Perl, git, GitHub, GitLab, CI, and testing.

Gabor Szabo