Rust 2017 Survey Report: Learning curve is the biggest pain point (the biggest problem is that the language is too low-level, now do the bottom of the less.) and C, the one that doesn't go around.

Rust officials conducted a survey in the community to see how users perceive Rust's development. The survey received a total of 5,368 responses, of which about 2/3 were rust users and the remaining 1/3 were non-Rust users, the results of which were as follows.

Click here to view the full survey report

Look at the user who is using Rust first. In terms of service life, more than one year accounted for 42.5% (higher than last year's 30%), 18% of users only used less than one months.

Rust is currently used primarily for small and medium-sized projects, with large projects accounting for 16% (higher than last year's 8.9%), which also demonstrates the growing interest of users in using Rust in large projects.

However, while developers are increasing the amount of code written in Rust, there is a slight decline in usage frequency for daily use and weekly usage. The daily use of users dropped from 19% last year to 17.5%, and weekly users dropped from 48.8% to 43.3%.

The Rust compiler has improved significantly in stability. Last year 16.2% of users said that upgrading to the new stable Rust compiler would break their code. This year, the figure dropped to 7.5%.

In addition to the latest stable version, developers prefer to choose the nightly version (daily/nightly build), which also shows that developers are eager to have new experiences and features as soon as possible.

Linux is still the most important platform for Rust developers, with Windows 31.5% users growing at a higher rate than last year's 27.6%.

In the editor, Vim is still the most popular, but Vscode is growing at a rapid pace from 3.8% last year to 34.1%. Atom, Emacs, IntelliJ accounted for a small difference.

For those who have used it before and are no longer using Rust, the survey found that:

• 23% of people think Rust is too hard to use.

• 20% of people said they didn't have enough time to learn and use Rust effectively.

• 10% replied that the tools were not mature enough.

• 5% of users feel they need better IDE support.

• The remaining users indicated that the use of rust was a work requirement and that they had completed projects that required the use of rust.

Learning curve and language complexity are the reasons why many users are reluctant to accept Rust. In addition, the survey shows that more people are not learning rust or because rust does not have enough active business projects to make it part of the business.

Finally, the report also collects suggestions from user feedback that Rust needs to be improved:

• 17% of users think Rust needs better ease of use in order to be easier to prototype, more prone to asynchronous programming, more flexibility to use more data structure types, and more.

• 16% of users want Rust to value the importance of documentation. For example, to help users convert from other languages, to create more examples and sample projects, to help beginners quickly get started and learn the content and so on.

• 15% of users believe that Rust's support for core libraries needs to be improved.

• 9% of users believe that better IDE support is needed.

• 8% of users think the learning curve needs to be improved. When they try to learn Rust or teach colleagues and friends, they will find that there is not enough learning resources.

• Also includes: Compile time improvements, more enterprise support, language interoperability improvements, tool improvements, web assembly support improvements, better error message prompts, more promotions, and more.

Click here to view the full survey report

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Rust 2017 Survey Report: Learning curve is the biggest pain point (the biggest problem is that the language is too low-level, now do the bottom of the less.) and C, the one that doesn't go around.