I did a talk at RustConf about Rust for machine learning.
The short story is that rust is awesome for handling data - especially unclean data. But Python, or really anything with a REPL, is still ideal for the exploratory phase using ipython notebook and whatnot.
Rust would be suitable for building machine learning algorithms but it's still immature in that area. For now you could perform the data processing in rust and the ML in Python.
It looks like most of the frameworks for ML started before Rust's 1.0 stable so it's no surprise we're not seeing it in those arenas. Since GPUs and CUDA in particular play such a heavy role in ML I also wouldn't be surprised if some projects chose C/C++ to avoid maintaining multiple languages (CUDA uses C kernels compiled by a proprietary compiler).
From my understanding, most ML work isn't really done at the algorithm level but at the data level, as in manipulating data and experimenting with a variety of existing implementations. Since we have so much experience already available in optimizing C and there's not that much actual low level code to write, it makes sense to stick to C.
IMHO, ML people are pretty pragmatic, possible due to the fact ML itself a mixed paradigm with people from different background, so they don't hold religious belief towards programming languages comparing to some pure CS background folks.
For the record, I've used rust for machine learning, and it was great. It isn't for "religious beliefs" - both myself, an engineer, and a data scientist on my team, had great results using rust.
Rust is entirely practical and well suited for the task. And yes, people use rust.
What I am objecting here, are those annoying cool kids try to sell their flashy green solutions, like 'A new machine learning library written in Rust' to other people, because 'yeah, Rust is better programming language than C++'.
That is what I called 'religion belief', for those people who don't really care what problems they solved, they just naively assume they are better because of the language they are using is different.
Maybe they're not annoying cool kids but people doing work in a new domain and trying to share the benefits.
I don't think people are saying that their solutions are better just because they're in rust. Maybe somewhere someone is, but the majority of what I see doesn't really sound like that.
Thanks for opening up and being honest about this. If you let Rust into your heart, you will find that it can help machines learn wonderful, beautiful things. I will share my Book of Rust with you if you promise to read it. It opened my mind.
In addition to the other responses, the ecosystems around Rust ML (e.g. scientific computing) are still very early and the Rust ML community itself is still fairly small. Take a peek at arewelearningyet.com
The short story is that rust is awesome for handling data - especially unclean data. But Python, or really anything with a REPL, is still ideal for the exploratory phase using ipython notebook and whatnot.
Rust would be suitable for building machine learning algorithms but it's still immature in that area. For now you could perform the data processing in rust and the ML in Python.