A bit off-topic, but it seems articles with "in Rust" or "in Go" tacked on the end are consistently upvoted to the front-page. I wonder how well this reflects actual usage of the languages Rust and Go...
The in Rust in the title therefore catches my eye because it could solve some of my problems, depending on how it is implemented.
I didn't say that upwork is skewing it intentionally, I'm saying that the samples aren't representative of the larger population.
I follow a few job agents because I do part time work as an examiner for applied CS students, and I occasionally advice on what languages they should teach to make sure their students are job ready, and nothing has really changed for a decade. Python demand is really the only area that has seen a real increase, but not for developers as you need some sort of degree in either statistics or math to get the ML/BI jobs.
It’s always a little sad to see students who spend a lot of time buying into the hype and building their final projects in something like Rust or Go and before that node/express. Because they’ll have a much harder time finding a job than the ones who didn’t do that. Not because learning Rust is bad, but because it’s safer (and cheaper) to chose their competition and it’s not like there is really a lack of freshly educated developers anymore.
Sure, Rust is not going to replace Java anytime soon (probably not at all). But for a language that has seen its first stable release only four years ago [1], Rust is a wildly successful systems programming language.
[1] Before Rust 1.0, Rust was not really usable in production due to very frequent changes to the language.
I'd say given Rust's age it's popular, and since it is the first contender for a lot of spaces where no other languages have made a serious bid in a while (embedded and real-time systems with higher safety guarantees haven't seen much love since ADA).
It will probably not supplant easy super popular languages like python. But I believe it might find it's niche. A lot of other languages don't have such a USP.
Yea, I definitely don't think it'll ever be as hugely mainstream as "easy" languages - take Go for instance, but it has huge potential and I'm a big fan of the language (I've switched entirely to it).
It may be possible that another language can come up with a more elegant solution for the memory safety features of Rust, but until that happens I think Rust will gain a lot of ground. It just won't be the language people turn to unless they have a use case explicitly for Rust (or rather, something that disqualifies Go/Python/etc to them).