Survey: Memory-Safe Rust Gains 45% of Enterprise Development

The Rust programming language has crossed a key adoption threshold, with 45% of organizations now making significant use of the programming language in production — a seven percentage-point jump from 2023, according to the 2024 State of Rust Survey, an annual survey conducted by the Rust Foundation.

Rust adoption has grown due to several factors, not least of which is that it represents a memory-safe alternative to languages such as C and C++.

According to the survey, organizations primarily choose Rust for building correct and bug-free software (87.1%), performance characteristics (84.5%), security and safety properties (74.8%), and development enjoyment (71.2%).

“Rust is rightfully seen as a secure language and ecosystem. So we like to try to stay ahead of potential security issues that could arise in the future,” Joel Marcey, director of technology at Rust Foundation, told The New Stack in a previous interview. “Some of the projects that the foundation is working on like Painter and Typomania try to tackle these potential issues head on where we try to understand the potential pathways if vulnerable code arises or if people try to typosquat crates.”

Top Use Cases and Development Environments

Rust seems to be especially popular for creating server backends (53.4%), web and networking services, cloud technologies and WebAssembly, the report said. It also seems to be gaining more traction for embedded use cases.

Rust’s “ownership model and borrow checker guarantee memory safety without the need for garbage collection, making it ideal for building reliable software in domains such as embedded systems, cloud native infrastructure and automotive applications,” Arnal Dayaratna, an analyst at IDC, told The New Stack in December.

Regarding the preferred development environment, Linux remains the dominant development platform (73.7%). However, although VS Code remains the leading editor, its usage dropped five percentage points, from 61.7% to 56.7%, but the Zed editor gained notable traction, from 0.7% to 8.9%. Also, “nine out of 10 Rust developers use the current stable version, suggesting strong confidence in the language’s stability,” the report said.

Rust on the Job

Meanwhile, Rust is being used more regularly, and it is more likely to be used on the job.

The survey shows a marked increase in professional Rust adoption, as 38% of respondents now use Rust for the majority of their coding at work, up from 34% in 2023, and 45% of organizations make nontrivial use of Rust (up seven percentage points from 2023). Overall, 82% of respondents report that Rust helped their company achieve its goals, and daily Rust usage increased to 53% (up four percentage points from 2023).

When asked why they use Rust at work, 47% of respondents cited a need for precise control over their software, which is up from 37% when the question was asked two years ago.

Ongoing Challenges

Despite the positive steps, several key challenges persist with Rust. For instance, compilation speed remains the top concern. “It seems to be a perennial concern of Rust users. As always, there are efforts underway to improve the speed of the compiler, such as enabling the parallel frontend or switching to a faster linker by default,” the report said.

Additionally, other challenges included subpar support for debugging Rust and high disk usage of Rust compiler artifacts. Yet, “on the other hand, most Rust users seem to be very happy with its runtime performance, the correctness and stability of the compiler and also Rust’s documentation,” the report said.

Finally, while some respondents expressed a desire for faster feature stabilization (25.6% want quicker evolution); 57.9% said they are satisfied with the current pace of Rust evolution.

Lawrence Hecht contributed to this article.