[epoch1970]

Rust inherited the enthusiasm of some very prominent and outspoken members of the Ruby community. These ex-Rubyists honed the craft of projecting excitement with Ruby and RoR, and brought these skills and talents with them when they moved to the Rust camp. The D camp hasn't really had anyone like that join them.

[jguegant]

I have to agree on this. I was surprised to see that a majority of the Rust community actually comes from some web-development domains. Especially when comparing Ruby, a highly flexible dynamic language, to Rust a language full of constraints (for its own valid reasons).

Note that the a hype train is a two-edged sword, it will both bring a strong community and might also induce a cliff with the other communities (praising a single god is never a good thing).

[kbenson]

An alternative interpretation might be that rust has particular appeal to those that primarily use dynamic languages. It's probably both, but I will say that as someone that's busy getting stuff done in Perl[1] every day, rust looks appealing, and a lot of that has to do with guarantees. If I'm going to give up the convenience of Perl for a lower level language[2], I need to be sold. Rust's promise of provably correct memory management sounds really good in that situation.

1: I've used lower level languages, but for nothing large, and I haven't started a project in C, C++ or even Java in over a decade, and was never very enamored.

[steveklabnik]

As someone who fits this mould, for me, it's not exactly that. Yes, in my professional life, people know me for my Rails work, but I learned C at a very young age, and while my systems-level stuff was a bit out of practice, for me, Rust is a _return_ to the kind of stuff I used to do earlier in life.

Oh, and I'm not sure "majority" is really true. Yeah, maybe some of us have disproportionate impact, but a very large number of people in Rust-land really know their systems stuff. I am humbled to work alongside such talented people.