Rust Programming Language Adoption and Usage Trends

The Rust programming language has been steadily evolving since 2010, but it was publicly released only in 2015. The language was initially developed by Graydon Hoare in 2006 and has been supported by Mozilla Firefox since 2009. Immediately upon its release in 2015, the developer community accepted Rust and realized its potential and huge benefits compared to more widespread programming languages like C and C++.

In 2021, the Rust Foundation was established by Amazon, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, Mozilla, and other industry giants to support the language and its community. The Rust Foundation aims at assuring the tech world that Rust is here to stay for years to come, as it’s proven a reliable and extremely useful programming language. If you’re looking to leverage this technology in your projects, consider exploring Rust development services provided by experienced vendors.

In this post, we discuss why Rust’s market share is so big among developers and how this language has managed to win so much trust from the tech community in just a few years.

According to Stackoverflow’s Annual Developer Surveys, Rust popularity graph has been growing, putting Rust among the most wanted and loved programming languages for a few years. The table below illustrates Rust popularity over time and the significant rise in the number of developers eager to work with Rust.

According to the same Stackoverflow’s survey, Rust continues to be the most-admired programming language with an 83% score this year. SlashData has identified Rust as the fastest-growing language community. In the latest available State of the Developer Nation 22nd Edition, Rust also moved from 14th to 12th place in SlashData’s ranking of programming languages in just six months. Around this programming language has gathered a strong community of developers who care about performance, memory and thread safety, and security.

The adoption of Rust by huge tech companies is also inspiring:

• Mozilla was the first company associated with Rust. Graydon Hoare, the inventor of Rust, worked at Mozilla Research, and the company soon invested in the language and became its loyal supporter. When writing Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox, developers were able to replace about 160,000 lines of C++ code with only 85,000 lines of Rust code.
• Dropbox, a popular file hosting service, has written some of its core file storage components in Rust. The language is also used to develop some features of the brand’s file-syncing engine.
• Cloudflare, a content delivery network and provider of web security services, leverages Rust because the language offers WebAssembly support. They also used Rust to create Pingora, an in-house HTTP proxy that serves over one trillion requests a day.
• Discord, a social platform for instant messaging and voice communication, switched from Go to Rust to avoid the latency spikes they used to experience with the Read States service.

We can see that lots of large and prominent companies are reaping lots of benefits of Rust. In the next section, we consider these benefits in detail.

According to a recent Rust survey conducted among 9450 Rust programmers, here are the top reasons Rust is used:

• The possibility to build correct and bug-free software (87.1%)
• High performance of the language (84.5%)
• Robust security properties (74.8%)

These are the three pillars of the Rust programming language that make it such a viable option. Let’s focus on these benefits and some more in detail to see how they can be advantageous for businesses.

Correct and bug-free software. With Rust, you can be sure that if the code compiles, it’s correct and will work as planned. Rust doesn’t have undefined behavior present in other programming languages that can be spotted only during production when it’s already late and costly to fix bugs. Thus, Rust applications are unlikely to fail in production, as their behavior is defined and predictable.

Memory safety. Rust software won’t have memory leaks, as it enforces an ownership model and the Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII) concept. It also doesn’t require manual memory management. Plus, Rust doesn’t have a garbage collector (a tool for freeing application memory by gathering unused memory), which occupies much of the runtime in other programming languages like Java and C#.

Here is an example of why memory safety is such an important benefit of using Rust. In C++ applications, there are often cases when manual freeing of memory isn’t considered in the code in advance, leading to memory leaks. The longer the system exists, the more memory it starts using. This memory use will grow until the system memory is completely exhausted. Eventually, the system gets stuck and reboots. System rebooting may happen at any time, causing inconveniences for the business and system users.

High performance. The virtual machines and garbage collectors used by some languages significantly impact application performance. A garbage collection process stops the work of the application until its job is done. Thanks to the ownership model and RAII concept in Rust, you can ensure your application’s uninterrupted and high performance.

Security. The safety of Rust code stems from its memory management model and strict compiler checks. Partnering with an experienced team ensures that your software is built to avoid common vulnerabilities like memory corruption, crashes, and potential security breaches.

Sustainability and energy efficiency. Along with C, Rust is considered one of the most energy-efficient languages. However, thanks to its impressive memory safety and security benefits, Rust significantly outperforms C. The fact that Rust is also a super-fast compiled language without a garbage collector and a virtual machine contributes to its high energy efficiency. And that’s one of the reasons lots of prominent companies using  Rust programming language rely on it. For instance, AWS is actively offering diverse solutions in Rust to enable next-generation sustainable solutions.

Even though developing a software solution in Rust may require more effort and investments at the beginning, your final software product will be energy-efficient, cost-efficient, and secure, and it won’t require frequent and costly changes in the future.

Elaborate documentation and supportive community. The Rust community is one of the fastest-growing, and its documentation is properly organized and sufficiently detailed. Support and feedback from the Rust community are also strong, allowing developers to exchange experiences and ideas, driving the spread of this programming language around the world.

In the next section, we take a closer look at Rust language use cases in the business world to help you better understand what has made Rust one of the most loved languages for years and define its place in the modern technology ecosystem.

So, what is Rust programming language? Rust is a general-purpose language with functional programming capabilities for building efficient, scalable, maintainable, and productive software components. With Rust, it’s possible to build high-performance distributed systems, embedded systems, IoT solutions, and all sorts of web services.

Explore more information about Rust in our new article about Golang vs Rust.

One of the prominent Rust application examples is the Linux Kernel, which is primarily written in C. The Linux community decided to add Rust support in creating kernel modules. When Mozilla Firefox switched to Rust, doing so made it one of the fastest browsers in the world.

Systems programming: embedded and distributed systems

The Rust programming language is perfect for embedded systems. With Rust frameworks, you can develop bare-metal and real-time operating system (RTOS) embedded systems. In bare-metal systems, firmware written in Rust can run directly on a microcontroller’s hardware without an abstraction layer of the operating system and drivers. For RTOS embedded systems, there is a need for a real-time operating system, particularly for applications that should have a quick response time.

Tock is an example of an embedded operating system written in Rust. This operating system is suitable for sensor networks and IoT platforms. Tock allows multiple applications to run concurrently on a microcontroller-based computer. Another example of an embedded operating system written in Rust is Theseus OS. According to its documentation, Theseus can be especially useful in high-end embedded systems and edge data centers.

Another great Rust usage example are large distributed networks with lots of connected devices that require aggregating and processing large amounts of data. Thus, IoT device manufacturers and medical device manufacturers can especially benefit from adopting Rust.

Read also: IIoT data management and analytics for large manufacturers

IoT connectivity and edge computing

Rust can take IoT technologies to a totally new level — the fastest level, actually. In 2019, 42 Technology announced its first single-chip IoT devices built on Rust. Writing firmware for the embedded device in Rust proved faster than writing firmware in C. Thus, 42 Technology revealed the massive potential of Rust for ensuring high-speed IoT connectivity in embedded systems.

This language is extremely versatile and suitable for all levels of IoT connectivity: cloud, edge, and IoT devices. Depending on your business needs, you can choose to integrate Rust on any of these levels to ensure high-speed data processing and quick system response times.

At the device level, Rust is great for writing firmware that enables efficient processing of data from sensors. For edge gateways and data centers, Rust allows you to get the most out of hardware to ensure maximum network performance. As a high-productivity programming language, Rust has an advantage over other programming languages in the cloud environment as well.

High-performance engineering toolsets

Is Rust getting more popular? One of the most widespread uses for Rust is building engineering kits and toolsets that simplify and streamline software development. Rust is a good fit for building libraries to manage high loads, such as libraries for high-speed data and image processing. With the help of Rust-based libraries, it’s possible to build scalable and fast applications. For instance, a data science services company may leverage Rust to built high-performance algorithms for data analysis. The significant improvement of data processing times and system efficiency is one of the reasons why Rust is popular. With the help of Rust-based libraries, it’s possible to build scalable and fast applications. For example, the promising biotechnology startup Imeka is using Rust to build a library for enabling high-performance and high-resolution medical imaging algorithms on their brain imaging platform.

Rust is also a great option for building debugging and testing tools, helping developers quickly define and fix software vulnerabilities. For example, the information security consulting company Stratum Security is using Rust in conducting data exfiltration testing to ensure better application security for their clients. JetBrains offers convenient testing and debugging tools in Rust.

Read also: Testing IoT solutions: Guide to implementing a performance testing framework

Low-latency web services

Many global businesses such as Braintree, Postmates, and Snap view rely on Rust to power robust backend logic for their web services. Actually, Rust is suitable for streamlining any kind of client-server architecture. Snapview, a German digital communication company, uses Rust on the server side to provide high-quality and high-performance video conferencing services.

Building web services in Rust is the right way to go to ensure high performance and low latency for your web applications and platforms. However, software performance is always dependent on both the software architecture and the programming language. Learn how we revamped the software architecture for a distributed healthcare network to build a cloud-based medical imaging system for securely syncing medical images between medical equipment and a company’s EHR system.

Ensuring better system performance by simply building backend logic on a high-performance language such as Rust may be insufficient. It’s also critical to audit your architecture to see whether it’s capable of handling the high load. Only after fixing any architectural issues can we implement backend logic in a fast programming language such as Rust.

Rust can also easily integrate with other programming languages, making it a perfect choice for building efficient web services that enable smooth communication between applications built in multiple languages.

All of the Rust use cases we’ve mentioned demonstrate that this programming language is a superb building block for your business software systems. Rust is primarily meant to help you get the most out of your hardware, and it is capable of transforming hardware and software components into a cohesive and productive whole.

Read also: Telehealth solution with a remote patient monitoring module

Professional adoption has accelerated dramatically, with 68.75% growth in commercial usage between 2021 and 2025. Currently, 38% of Rust developers use it at work for the majority of their coding (up from 34% in 2025), and 45% of organizations now employ Rust for non-trivial production systems, a 7-percentage-point increase from the previous year.

Embedded Systems & IoT

The embedded systems sector is experiencing rapid Rust adoption. Google’s Android team now uses Rust for system components. Espressif Systems, maker of popular ESP32 microcontrollers, has dedicated teams developing Rust tools and libraries. Major players, including ARM, Samsung SmartThings, and various IoT device manufacturers, have adopted Rust for firmware development. The Safety-Critical Rust Consortium, formed in 2024, includes automotive and aerospace companies committed to Rust adoption.

Cloud Computing & Infrastructure

Cloud infrastructure represents one of Rust’s strongest adoption areas (adoption rate: 24.3%). Amazon Web Services built Firecracker, a microVM technology serving millions of instances daily across AWS Lambda and Fargate, entirely in Rust. Microsoft is systematically rewriting Windows kernel components in Rust to reduce memory vulnerabilities. Google integrated Rust into the Android Open Source Project for secure system components, including media codecs and file management.

Backend & Web Services

Backend development emerged as the single most common use case for Rust in production. Discord migrated critical services from Go to Rust to eliminate latency spikes, achieving significantly improved performance. Cloudflare uses Rust extensively, including for Pingora, an HTTP proxy serving over one trillion requests daily. Meta (Facebook) rebuilt internal source control tools using Rust to handle their massive monorepo system.

Automotive Software

• Market Value: $428M → $2.1B projected by 2033
• Growth Rate: 19.2% CAGR

The automotive sector shows exceptional growth potential. The global Rust adoption for the automotive software market was valued at $428 million in 2024 and is projected to reach $2.1 billion by 2033, representing a 19.2% compound annual growth rate. Toyota’s Woven subsidiary, ETAS (a Bosch subsidiary), Elektrobit, and BlackBerry QNX have all officially adopted Rust for embedded automotive software. European automakers are particularly aggressive adopters due to stringent ISO 26262 safety regulations.

Data Analysis & AI Infrastructure

Rust plays a critical infrastructure role in AI and data science, powering tools that Python and JavaScript developers use daily. High-profile projects, including uv (Python package manager) and Turbopack (JavaScript bundler), are built in Rust. The language is particularly strong for ML infrastructure backends, data pipelines, and performance-critical AI tooling.

Despite strong growth, Rust adoption faces challenges. 45.5% of developers worry about insufficient industry adoption (up from 42.5% in 2023), and 45.2% cite complexity as a barrier to entry. Slow compilation times and debugging difficulties persist, though tools like rust-analyzer are improving workflows. The Stack Overflow usage rate declined slightly from 13.05% in 2023 to 12.6% in 2024, suggesting some adoption challenges.
However, continued government support (including U.S. White House recommendations for memory-safe languages), adoption by major technology companies, and growing ecosystem maturity position Rust for sustained growth across security-critical, performance-sensitive, and safety-critical industries.

These comprehensive statistics demonstrate that Rust has successfully transitioned from an experimental language to a production-ready technology with significant traction across cloud infrastructure, blockchain, embedded systems, automotive, financial services, and system programming domains.

The combination of memory safety guarantees, performance characteristics, and growing ecosystem support continues to drive adoption across industries where reliability and security are paramount.