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Rust is the fastest-growing programming language, with its developer community doubling in size over the past two years, yet JavaScript remains the most popular language with 25.2 million active developers, according to the results of a recent survey.
The 26th edition of SlashData’s Developer Nation survey showed that the Rust community doubled its number of users over the past two years — from two million in the first quarter of 2022 to four million in the first quarter of 2024 — and by 33% in the last 12 months alone. The SlashData report covers the first quarter of 2024.
“Rust has developed a passionate community that advocates for it as a memory-safe language which can provide great performance, but cybersecurity concerns may lead to an even greater increase,” the report said. “The USA and its international partners have made the case in the last six months for adopting memory-safe languages.”
However, Rust is not unique in this capability, but its performance benefits and memory safety are likely to lead to further growth in this developer community, the report projects.
“Recent advocacy and research efforts from agencies like NSA, CISA, NIST, and ONCD can serve as valuable evidence of the considerable risk memory-safety vulnerabilities pose to our digital ecosystem, Rebecca Rumbul, executive director and CEO of the Rust Foundation, told The New Stack.
Moreover, “The Rust Foundation believes that the Rust programming language is the most powerful tool we have to address critical infrastructure security gaps. As an organization, we are steadfast in our commitment to further strengthening the security of Rust through programs like our Security Initiative,” she said.
Meanwhile, JavaScript continues to take the top spot for programming languages, with just over 25 million active developers worldwide.
“JavaScript’s dominant position is unlikely to change anytime soon, with its developer population increasing by 4M developers over the last 12 months, with a growth rate in line with the global developer population growth,” the report said.
The strength of the JavaScript community is fueled by the widespread use of the language across all types of development projects, with at least 25% of developers in every project type using it, the report said. “Even in development areas not commonly associated with the language, such as on-device coding for IoT projects, JavaScript still sees considerable adoption,” SlashData said.
Also, coming in strong, Python has overtaken Java as the second most popular language, driven by the interest in machine learning and AI.
The battle between Python and Java shows Python with 18.2 million developers in Q1 2024 compared to Java’s 17.7 million. This comes about after Python added more than 2.1 million net new developers to its community over the last 12 months, compared to Java which only increased by 1.2 million developers.
Still, Java remains one of the most popular languages after nearly 30 years in existence.
Indeed, “Java has seen an increase in its usage among developers involved in backend services and web application development but has maintained the same proportion of mobile developers and a decreasing proportion of desktop application developers,” the report said.
Following behind Java there is a six-million-developer gap to the next largest community, which is C++ with 11.4 million developers, closely trailed by C# with 10.2 million and PHP with 9.8 million. Languages with the smallest communities include Objective-C with 2.7 million developers, Ruby with 2.5 million, and Lua with 1.8 million.
Meanwhile, the Go language saw its developer population grow by 10% over the last year. It had previously outpaced the global developer population growth, growing by 5Y% over the past two years, from three million in Q1 2022 to 4.7 million in Q1 2024.
However, despite its period of reduced growth, “Go overall is an appealing language due to its performance capabilities, simplifying concurrency, and being easy to read. This has led to it being used by 10% of backend service developers, as well as among games developers (5%),” the report said.
Moreover, Go’s comprehensive standard library that reduces reliance on third-party dependencies likely benefits its popularity among those working in backend services, as this can help reduce a software’s attack surface, the report said.
In contrast to the growth of languages such as Rust, Objective-C has stagnated for the last two years. The number of Objective-C users has hovered around 2.5M developers over this period and in terms of language rankings, it has dropped from 12th to 14th, being overtaken by both Dart and Rust.
Apple continues to support Objective-C; however Swift has emerged as the go-to language for all Apple platforms. Swift has seen a small growth over the past 12 months (5%) to 4.6 million developers, which led to it being overtaken by Go. And over the past 24 months, Swift added more than 1.1 million developers to its community.
Yet, “While Swift is continuing to grow, we would expect Rust to be a larger language within the next year if both continue their current growth trajectories,” the report said.
SlashData estimates that, as of Q1 2024, there are 43 million active software developers in the world.
The 26th edition of SlashData’s Developer Nation survey reached more than 10,000 respondents from 135 countries. The report is based on a large-scale, online developer survey over a period of 10 weeks between November 2023 and February 2024.
TNS analyst Lawrence Hecht has a few different takeaways. He notes that with the exceptions of Rust, Go and JavaScript, the other major programming languages all grew slower than the total developer population, which SlashData says increased 39% over the last two years alone.
SlashData’s estimate for the total number of developers is significantly higher than the 2023 Evans Data estimate of 26.3 million. Both estimates are based on a lot of unpublished assumptions. That is one reason why he thinks the percentage of developers using a particular language is more useful.
Taking this approach, we can see that Python (48% to 42%) and C# (32% to 24%) usage declined significantly from 2022 to 2024 as a percentage of all developers.
