[ceteia]

Do you know of a good way to measure market share? I know of GitHub's and StackOverflow's surveys, but I'm not sure how well they reflect reality. There is also Redmonk.

GitHub's survey did not say much about Rust I think, despite Rust projects often having lots of starring. Rust projects might have a greater ratio of stars-to-popularity than projects in other languages, though.

StackOverflow's survey was much more optimistic or indicated popularity for Rust.

Redmonk places Rust at place 19th.

[pron]

The best sources are industry studies by market research companies that collect information from companies. The best public sources, IMO, are those based on job openings (as jobs correlate more with total number of lines of code than sources based on number of repos, PRs, or questions). Some of these are about a year out-of-date:

https://www.devjobsscanner.com/blog/top-8-most-demanded-prog...

https://uk.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/codin...

https://www.itransition.com/developers/in-demand-programming...

https://www.hackerrank.com/blog/top-developer-skills-in-2025...

Viewing these numbers through an optimistic or pessimistic lens is a matter of perspective and, of course, no one knows the future. But when you compare Rust, which is a middle-aged language now, to how languages that ended up "making it" were at the same age, the comparison is not favourable.

[zozbot234]

The first genuinely usable version of Rust was only released in late 2018. Rust is a very new language still.

[pron]

Except you could say something similar about the first few years of every language that became very popular, and the comparison would still not be in Rust's favour.