[cmrdporcupine]

Not sure I'd go that far. I am getting paid to work full-time in Rust right now, but... My experience is the # of companies doing this that aren't "web3" companies is pretty small. Insignificant as a % of the total industry. Rust forums on LinkedIn are dominated by chatter about Solana etc. When recruiters reach out to me about Rust, it's almost always some blockchainy thing. I wouldn't characterize that as mainstream.

Type "Rust" into a job search engine and see what comes up, it's mostly blockchainy stuff. Or a few shops that are "looking into" doing Rust for new projects (which is encouraging, but hard to say how that will shake out).

I personally won't touch anything "crypto", so I feel somewhat lucky to be getting paid to work in Rust right now for something that isn't. But I fully expect that once this gig finishes, it'll probably be back to C++ for me.

[ralfj]

Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook/Meta, and Google are all using Rust in production. It's not just web3 nonsense.

[stormbrew]

Also Apple, fwiw. I just left a job doing rust there a few months ago (for another job doing rust at another FAANG). But if you have an iphone and use icloud, rust code has probably been involved in some part of your daily life (just not on the phone itself) for the last couple of years.

Rust usage at these companies isn't yet 'large' in the sense of KLoC or anything, especially compared to existing legacy codebases, but it's getting put in at some really critical infrastructure levels that are unlikely to do anything but grow imo.

That's kind of the thing about rust though. That's where it's got the most power to improve things, so its introduction to a workspace is kind of subtle.

[ralfj]

Oh that's interesting, I kept saying Apple is the only "big tech" company not using Rust. (Huawei should probably also be considered "big tech", but they are also using Rust.) But with Apple being as closed as they are, I guess it's not too surprising that one doesn't hear much about it...

Is there any public source for Apple using Rust?

And yeah those are exactly the domains Rust is designed for, and even if it doesn't mean huge codebases, that kind of usage at a whole bunch of huge companies hopefully means Rust is more likely to survive beyond the initial hype. :)

[stormbrew]

I mean, there'll never be a press release or anything, but here's a job posting: https://jobs.apple.com/en-ca/details/200389976/software-engi...

[cmrdporcupine]

That particular posting has been up in some form forever. I'm always tempted to apply, since I'm from Edmonton area originally, and my whole family is there, and I do Rust. I've always found it curious that that posting exists, since Apple has no other presence there.

But a) it's Apple, a stressy, workaholic company to work for [at least that's how it seemed when my wife worked there] and b) I'd never convince the wife and kids to move right now.

[stormbrew]

It's the team I worked on. Apple has had an office in the Edmonton area for about 9 years now, originally in camrose (which if you're from here you'll probably think is hilarious), now in downtown Edmonton (the move was during COVID lockdown). It's generally been about a 10 person team, give or take, but recently split into two teams that are both doing rust in different areas.

It's a surprising location and the story behind it existing is fun but also not mine to tell, but if you applied and interviewed you'd almost certainly get to hear it. The stuff that team does is much more important than its location would suggest and the software they build was mostly originally in C (not c++), which is also kind of surprising for the services side of apple. We were involved in porting swift to Linux in the hopes it would meet our needs but that didn't work out for various silly reasons.

At any rate it's not the only part of apple using rust, but it is probably the earliest adopter and also the most mission critical user there.

> But a) it's Apple, a stressy, workaholic company to work for [at least that's how it seemed when my wife worked there] and b) I'd never convince the wife and kids to move right now.

Fwiw this team isn't really any of those things, it's very unusual in a lot of ways. Very good work life balance, especially now that the office isn't an hour from a real city.

I didn't leave on bad terms at all, I just needed a change of scenery and the one big downside to that office is you can't really go to any other teams because Apple is so dead set against remote or distributed teams without a shared office space, so you're just kinda stuck. Also I ran out my patience for not being able to work on open source unrelated to my job (though at least it got easier to work on open source related to my job over the time I did work there).

[cmrdporcupine]

I just finished a 10 year stint at Google in December.

I would characterize the amount of Rust being done at Google as ... insignifant.

That could change, but apart from Fuchsia and maybe some kernel driver work I struggle to picture where it would fit in the language pantheon there.

[ralfj]

Yeah, I am aware it's far from a main language at these companies, but having any use at all is a strong sign.

I am in contact with some people in the Android team at Google that are also using Rust (and that want to use Miri :D ).

[cmrdporcupine]

I looked around for work in Rust inside Google a year or so before I left and it was only some small parts of Fuchsia and not anything hiring at my site.

But I'm sure it's growing. But it won't be in the core Google3-on-Borg parts of Google, which are on the whole in either C++ or (increasingly) Go. Switching to a standardized garbage collected Google supported language makes sense in that domain. The "Carbon" stuff recently announced sounds interesting as well.

The long term looks good for Rust. But actual production code is still thin on the ground still everywhere.

[anp]

(disclaimer: I work on Fuchsia, not speaking on behalf of my employer, feel free to clone the source repo and make your own analysis)

FWIW, to the best of my memory as of a year ago I counted ~1.1 MLoC of Rust code in our open source tree, with an additional ~1.3 MLoC in things we've vendored from crates.io.

There was a bit more C++ when I did the analysis, but it was the same order of magnitude.

[cmrdporcupine]

Good to hear. A few years ago, there was a team advertising on grow/ for Fuchsia & Rust (for networking stuff I think), and they advertised in Waterloo but when I inquired, the posting went away and I was told they weren't actually hiring at my site. shrug Maybe it was my bad breath.

Other than that... Fuchsia was the thing that was rewriting all my work from scratch and killing everything I worked on (Chromecast on Home Hub, etc), so... :-)

[IshKebab]

> My experience is the # of companies doing this that aren't "web3" companies is pretty small.

Those are just the loudest people. Web3 companies depend on hype so they shout all over the web about anything they can, including how they're using the hot new language for blah blah blah and you can come and write it with us! (As long as you're willing to be paid in worthless tokens.)

In normal companies there is plenty of Rust use but you don't hear about it as much because it tends to be initiated internally by people who weren't hired as Rust programmers, and it's used for new projects that take a long time to get to the point of needing new employees. I know in my company it was at least 2 years between when we started using Rust and when we wrote "Rust" on a job advert.

[cultofmetatron]

it would be sad if rust gets ultimately typecast into a "blockchain" language

[cmrdporcupine]

It really would be, and we need to fight that. It's definitely a trend I've been seeing and it worries me.

Do a search on Upwork for Rust gigs. Almost all crypto.

LinkedIn jobs, very similar. Putting "Rust" in my profile there has also led to a lot of recruiters pinging me about web3-ish jobs that I have no interest in.

The Rust PL group I'm on, also on LinkedIn, has a steady stream of 'smart contract' etc discussions. And people advertising themselves for crypto jobs. Or crypto jobs advertising looking for people.

That's not to say there isn't plenty of other Rust stuff out there, but it seems like this is where a lot of the use is right now and I really hope the language as a whole doesn't get typecast this way.

[jrockway]

I got the same impression looking for Go a few years ago. I guess in a world without legacy code because it's too new for legacy code, you're going to use the newest programming languages. That was also the kind of startup that was getting funded back then. I haven't paid much attention but maybe the hype has died down over the last few months.

My overall thought is that programming language popularity is a lagging indicator; people might be hiring Java engineers even if they wish they didn't write their codebase in Java. Changing that is risky; getting one more employee can stop the bleeding. Meanwhile newly-formed companies use the newest tools, and thus among newly-formed companies, you're going to see many more requests for engineers with experience with the newer tools. (It's one of those secret advantages for startups; your competitor might be slowed down by all the legacy and thus resources given to your new startup might get more value than if given to the incumbent.)