Why Rust Is the Fastest Growing Programming Language in 2025

The numbers don’t lie — Rust’s developer community has doubled in two years, and major tech companies are betting their future on it.

When the White House publishes a cybersecurity report recommending a programming language over industry standards like C and C++, you pay attention. That happened in February 2024, when the US government officially endorsed Rust for memory safety reasons. But this wasn’t just political theater. It reflected a seismic shift already happening across the technology industry.

Rust’s developer community doubled from 2 million users in Q1 2022 to 4 million in Q1 2024 — a growth rate that outpaces every other programming language tracked by major developer surveys.

I’ve been watching Rust’s rise for three years now, and what started as curiosity from systems programmers has evolved into something bigger. Let me show you why Rust isn’t just growing fast — it’s fundamentally changing how we think about software development.

The Numbers That Tell the Story

First, let’s establish what “fastest growing” actually means with hard data: In the last 12 months alone, Rust’s community grew by 33%, according to SlashData’s Developer Nation survey. That’s not a small bump — that’s exponential growth in an industry where established languages typically see single-digit percentage increases. For the ninth consecutive year, Rust ranked as the “most loved” language in Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey, with an 83% admiration rate. This isn’t just popularity — it’s sustained enthusiasm from developers who actually use it.

According to JetBrains data, 2.26 million developers used Rust in the last 12 months, with 709,000 identifying it as their primary language. The gap between those numbers is telling — Rust is spreading into multi-language environments, not replacing entire tech stacks overnight. But here’s the metric that surprised me most: Rust reached its highest-ever position at #13 in the TIOBE Index in February 2025, up from never ranking higher than 17th previously.

What Makes Developers Actually Choose Rust?

I’ve interviewed dozens of developers who made the switch to Rust, and three themes emerge consistently: Memory Safety Without the Performance Tax Traditional systems languages like C and C++ give you raw speed but force you to manually manage memory. One mistake — a buffer overflow, a use-after-free error, a data race — and your application crashes or worse, becomes a security vulnerability. Rust’s ownership model ensures memory safety without needing a garbage collector, using static typing and compile-time checks to catch errors before they reach production.

Here’s what that means practically: At Discord, engineers rewrote performance-critical services from Go to Rust and saw significant improvements. At Amazon, Rust powers AWS Lambda’s performance layer. At Microsoft, parts of Windows are being rewritten in Rust. These aren’t experimental side projects — they’re production systems handling millions of requests. Concurrency That Actually Works

Writing multi-threaded code in C++ feels like defusing a bomb while blindfolded. You’re constantly worried about race conditions, deadlocks, and data corruption.

Rust’s borrow checker won’t let your code compile if there’s a potential race condition. This sounds annoying (and initially, it is), but it transforms how you write concurrent code. A GitHub staff software engineer noted that Rust enables developers to write “readable, maintainable, and crash-free multi-threaded programs while also enabling low-level memory control”.

The confidence you get from knowing your concurrent code is provably safe changes everything. You stop being defensive and start being productive. The Ecosystem Is Maturing Fast Three years ago, choosing Rust meant building everything from scratch. Today, the landscape has transformed. Cargo, Rust’s package manager, simplifies project management and dependency tracking, contributing to an efficient development workflow and a strong ecosystem of open-source libraries.

Need to build a web server? Actix, Axum, and Rocket provide production-ready frameworks. Working with databases? SQLx and Diesel have you covered. Building async systems? Tokio has become the de facto standard. The library ecosystem isn’t at JavaScript or Python levels yet, but it’s crossing the threshold where you can build most applications without constantly reinventing wheels.

Where Rust Is Actually Being Used in 2025

Rust is gaining traction in industries like cloud computing, systems programming, blockchain, and embedded systems. But let’s get specific about what that looks like:

Cloud Infrastructure: AWS uses Rust for Lambda, Firecracker (their microVM technology), and Bottlerocket (their container-focused Linux distribution). When you run serverless functions on AWS, there’s a good chance Rust is handling the orchestration.

Operating Systems: Microsoft is integrating Rust into Windows kernel components. The Linux kernel officially supports Rust as a second language for driver development. This is huge — these are the most conservative codebases in computing.

Web Services: Cloudflare uses Rust for their edge computing platform. Dropbox rewrote their sync engine in Rust. These are companies where performance and reliability directly impact revenue.

Blockchain and Crypto: Solana, Polkadot, and numerous DeFi protocols are built entirely in Rust. Love or hate crypto, these systems handle billions of dollars and demand zero-downtime reliability.

Rust is thriving in high-demand sectors such as cloud computing, data analysis, AI infrastructure, and embedded systems — essentially anywhere where performance and reliability are non-negotiable.

The Real Reason Companies Are Switching

Here’s something most articles won’t tell you: Companies aren’t adopting Rust primarily for performance. They’re adopting it for reliability and security.

Memory safety bugs account for roughly 70% of security vulnerabilities in systems software. Every buffer overflow, every use-after-free bug, every dangling pointer is a potential exploit waiting to happen.

The TIOBE CEO directly attributed Rust’s growth surge to increasing security awareness, noting “Rust is preparing itself for a top 10 position in the TIOBE index” as companies prioritize memory-safe languages.

The economics are simple: One security breach can cost millions in damages, regulatory fines, and reputation loss. Preventing those bugs at compile-time instead of discovering them in production is worth the investment in learning a new language.

The Challenges That Still Remain

I’d be lying if I said Rust was perfect. After working with it for two years, here are the real obstacles:

The Learning Curve Is Brutal

Rust is rarely a developer’s first programming language, as most Rust professionals come from diverse coding backgrounds with substantial experience. The ownership system, lifetimes, and borrow checker represent entirely new mental models.

Expect at least three months before you’re productive in Rust. Expect six months before you stop fighting the compiler. Expect a year before it clicks and you wonder how you ever wrote C++ without it.

Compile Times Are Painful

Rust does extensive work at compile time — borrow checking, trait resolution, monomorphization of generics. This makes runtime fast but compilation slow. On large projects, clean builds can take minutes. During development, incremental compilation helps, but it’s still noticeably slower than C++ or Go.

The Ecosystem Has Gaps

Unlike languages with a longer market presence, Rust is still relatively untested in large enterprise solutions, and developers often need to build services from scratch. You won’t find the mature GUI frameworks, extensive ML libraries, or enterprise integration tools that Python or Java provide. Those will come, but they’re not here yet.

Why This Growth Will Continue

Despite the challenges, I’m convinced Rust’s growth trajectory will accelerate for three reasons: 1. The Security Imperative: As software becomes more critical to infrastructure, finance, and safety, memory safety won’t be optional. Regulations will follow government recommendations. 2. The Talent Pipeline: One in six Go developers are considering switching to Rust, according to recent surveys. As more senior developers learn Rust, they’ll bring it to their organizations. 3. The Tooling Improvements: Every Rust release improves compile times, error messages, and developer experience. The language is actively addressing its weaknesses.

The Rust Foundation, backed by Amazon, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla, ensures the language is here to stay for years to come. Should You Learn Rust in 2025? Here’s my honest take after two years of production Rust experience: Learn Rust if you’re:

• Working in systems programming, cloud infrastructure, or embedded systems
• Building performance-critical services where milliseconds matter
• Concerned about security and want to prevent entire classes of bugs
• Ready to invest time upfront for long-term productivity gains
• Curious about modern language design and want to expand your thinking

Stick with your current language if:

• You’re building CRUD apps, websites, or standard business software
• Your team has no Rust experience and tight deadlines
• You work in domains where Python/JavaScript libraries are essential
• Learning curve time isn’t available right now

Rust isn’t replacing JavaScript for web development or Python for data science. It’s carving out dominance in systems programming, cloud infrastructure, and any domain where performance and reliability are paramount.

The Bottom Line

While JavaScript maintains the top spot with 25.2 million active developers, Rust’s developer community doubling in just two years represents the fastest growth of any programming language. This isn’t hype — it’s a fundamental shift in how we build software. Memory safety, fearless concurrency, and zero-cost abstractions aren’t just nice features. They’re becoming requirements as software eats the world and security becomes critical. I’ve watched languages come and go over my career. Rust feels different. It’s solving real problems that have plagued systems programming for 50 years, and it’s doing so without sacrificing performance.

The question isn’t whether Rust will continue growing. The question is how fast the rest of the industry will catch up.