What Developers Really Think About Rust in 2025: Key Survey Findings
The 2025 State of Rust Survey marks a milestone: the 10th edition of an annual tradition that helps the Rust team understand how the language is being used in practice. The survey ran for 30 days — from November 17th to December 17th, 2025 — collecting 7,156 responses. That's a modest decline compared to last year, though the completion rate remained similarly strong. The full report is available for download.
| Survey | Started | Completed | Completion rate | Views |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 9,450 | 7,310 | 77.4% | 13,564 |
| 2025 | 9,389 | 7,156 | 76.2% | 20,397 |
Year-over-year results are largely consistent, with most differences falling under a single percentage point. The slight drop in respondents may be partly explained by the number of other surveys published in 2025 — including the Compiler Performance and Variadic Generics surveys — which may have reduced appetite for this longer-form questionnaire. The team is also considering how (and whether) to integrate the State of Rust survey with the ongoing work on the Rust Vision Doc.
A word of caution on interpretation: 7,000 responses, while meaningful, can't be extrapolated too broadly — and some optional questions attracted even fewer replies.
With that context established, here are the key findings highlighted in this year's report:
Rust in practice: compiler usage and adoption patterns
The data confirms what the team has long observed: the majority of Rust developers build on the stable compiler and keep pace with releases, reflecting strong trust in Rust's stability and backwards-compatibility guarantees. Nightly usage, by contrast, appears to be need-driven — developers reach for it when a feature they require hasn't yet been stabilized.
Compared to last year's results, nightly usage appears notably lower — though this figure warrants some skepticism. Because the survey captures a snapshot in time, nightly adoption numbers can fluctuate depending on what highly anticipated features are in-flight at any given moment. The stabilization of let chains and async closures in 2025 may have reduced the pull toward nightly for many developers who had been waiting on those specific features.
The survey also gathered input from developers who have stepped away from Rust — a valuable signal. The data suggests that most departures are temporary rather than permanent: former users tend to cite situational factors rather than fundamental objections to the language.
Two narrower questions rounded out this section. The first examined how frequently developers pull in crates directly from a git repository via Cargo — for example, a dependency declared as foo = { git = "https://github.com/foo/bar" } — rather than from the registry.
The second looked at whether developers actually find the output of --explain useful when diagnosing compiler errors. Internal expectations were skeptical — but the survey data tells a different story. A significant share of Rust users do consult compiler error code explanations and find them genuinely helpful.
Challenges and wishes about Rust
The stabilization of let chains and async closures in 2025 clearly resonated with the community — both features rank among the most widely used additions in this year's results. With those long-standing requests addressed, attention has shifted: generic const expressions and improved trait methods have moved to the top of the most-wanted list. The remainder of the feature wish list remained largely unchanged from last year.
On the pain points side, the picture is similarly stable compared to 2024. Compile times and storage overhead remain the most commonly cited productivity drains. Debugging experience slipped from second to fourth place — a roughly two percentage point change — and the team has already responded by launching a dedicated survey to dig into that topic further.
Learning about Rust
Participation in online and offline learning communities — meetups, discussion forums, and similar venues — declined by a noticeable margin of around three percentage points. Open-answer responses suggest that some developers are redirecting questions toward LLM-based tooling rather than community channels. Despite this shift, official documentation remains the primary reference of choice, followed by reading source code directly.
Industry and community
The data confirms a sustained hiring trend: more organizations are actively seeking Rust developers. This steady growth suggests Rust has achieved genuine structural presence in the industry — codebases are maturing, and the total volume of production Rust code continues to expand.
As in past surveys, we asked respondents about their concerns for Rust's future. Given the audience, it's no surprise that the most common sentiment is simply wanting more Rust — but a persistent worry about growing language complexity continues to register strongly.
One area showing a slight uptick is concern over "developer and maintainer support." This is something the community is actively working to address. RustNL has launched a dedicated funding initiative (https://rustnl.org/fund), and the Rust Foundation has announced its own maintainers fund. The underlying challenge is retention: talented contributors often step back after extended periods of unpaid work, and targeted funding can help change that dynamic.
This data is also a direct message to companies building on Rust: consider investing in the ecosystem that powers your products. Options include joining the Rust Foundation, allocating paid employee time to upstream projects, or contributing through collective funding platforms such as Open Collective and thanks.dev, or through personal sponsorships via GitHub, Liberapay, or similar channels.
On a more positive note, trust in the Rust Foundation is trending upward — a meaningful signal worth acknowledging.
On the tooling front, we asked which editors respondents use when writing Rust. The standout result: the Zed editor made a notable leap up the rankings, with Helix close behind. Editors with agentic AI capabilities are also gaining ground — and based on the histogram, they appear to be drawing users away from both VS Code and IntelliJ.
We're happy to report that 11 developers are still faithful to Atom (hey 👋!), and we extend a respectful nod to those sticking with the classics — Emacs, Vim, and their many derivatives.
Finally, here is a breakdown of marginalized group representation among survey participants who completed the full survey:
| Marginalized group | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| Lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, or otherwise non-heterosexual | 752 | 10.59% |
| Neurodivergent | 706 | 9.94% |
| Trans | 548 | 7.72% |
| Woman or perceived as a woman | 457 | 6.43% |
| Non-binary gender | 292 | 4.11% |
| Disabled (physically, mentally, or otherwise) | 218 | 3.07% |
| Racial or ethnic minority | 217 | 3.06% |
| Political beliefs | 211 | 2.97% |
| Educational background | 170 | 2.39% |
| Cultural beliefs | 139 | 1.96% |
| Language | 134 | 1.89% |
| Religious beliefs | 100 | 1.41% |
| Other | 61 | 0.86% |
| Older or younger than the average developers I know | 22 | 0.31% |
Some of these figures have improved modestly, but the overall picture remains sobering: people from marginalized groups make up a very small share of the Rust community. While Rust compares favorably to many other tech ecosystems, these numbers are a reminder that building a genuinely diverse and inclusive open-source community requires sustained, deliberate effort — and that commitment remains a core value of the project.
Conclusions
No major surprises this year — but several important trends have been confirmed. For those who want to explore the data in greater depth, the full PDF report is available for download.
Our sincere thanks go to all the volunteers who helped design and translate the survey, and to every participant who took the time to contribute their perspective on the state of the Rust community.
A look back
Since this marks a milestone year, here's a chronological archive of past survey results for anyone who wants to trace how the Rust community has evolved over the years:
