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Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a reply to a sibling comment here [0], but wanted to reemphasize that Rust and Swift are far from popular. I think it bears repeating because the gap between a Rust/Swift and Go is notable, but the gap between a Rust/Swift and Java is a chasm. I would guess this isn't the intuition of an HNer (it wasn't mine until I dug in for this discussion haha)

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The median number of users across all programming languages is zero. Millions of people around the world use Rust and Swift, so it seems like a stretch to say they're far from popular. If Rust isn't a popular language compared to Java, we might just as well say Java is not a popular language compared to Excel.

I don't think millions of people use either Rust or Swift.

Millions of people don't use Go either.

You got me

According to SlashData "size of programming language communities, Q1 2025":

   28.0M JS+TS
   ...
   5.6M Swift
   5.1M Rust
   5.0M Go

They have measured Rust growing faster than Go over the years, with the overtake finally happening in Q1 this year.

There aren't a lot of reports presenting absolute numbers and not biased toward a handful of platforms or ecosystems. If you know of other good free ones, feel free to share.

https://research.slashdata.co/reports/6814fddffed4a97023eab0...

This is pretty intriguing but it wants me to make an account? Can I view it w/o doing that?

EDIT: also I gotta say these numbers seem kinda high. It's hard for me to imagine there's ~28m JS programmers worldwide; that's 1/286 people in the entire world, and the ratio gets less believable as you shrink down the number of people who might have any access at all to a computer/internet/etc. Unless this definition is super broad, I'm quite skeptical.

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