The 2025 State of Rust Survey marks a milestone: its 10th edition. Running for 30 days (November 17th to December 17th, 2025), it collected 7,156 responses — a modest year-over-year decline. This post highlights key findings from the results; 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 |
Results largely mirror last year's, with most differences falling under one percentage point. The gradual decline in respondents may partly reflect survey fatigue: in 2025, the Rust team published several additional targeted surveys, including the Compiler Performance and Variadic Generics surveys, which likely drew some respondents away from this longer annual edition. There are also ongoing discussions about whether and how to integrate the State of Rust survey with the Rust Vision Doc process.
One important caveat: with roughly 7,000 responses — and even fewer for some optional questions — these numbers should be interpreted with appropriate caution rather than treated as broadly representative benchmarks.
Below are the highlights worth examining closely:
Screenshotting Rust use
The data confirms a pattern that has held steady for years: most developers build on the stable compiler and track releases closely, reflecting broad confidence in Rust's stability and compatibility guarantees. Nightly usage, by contrast, tends to be driven by necessity — features not yet stabilized — rather than preference. Compared to last year's results, nightly adoption appears notably lower, though this may not signal a meaningful trend. Nightly download figures fluctuate depending on which features are in active development at any given moment — the surge of interest around let chains and async closures prior to their stabilization being one recent example.
The survey also captures responses from developers who have stepped away from Rust — a group the team genuinely values hearing from. The reasons cited most often read less like permanent departures and more like deferrals: developers waiting for the right project, better tooling, or a feature that's not quite ready yet. The sentiment is closer to "not right now" than "never again."
One area of specific interest this year: how frequently developers pull crates directly from a git repository pinned in Cargo.toml — for example, foo = { git = "https://github.com/foo/bar" } — rather than sourcing them from crates.io.
The team also wanted to gauge how useful developers find the --explain flag, which surfaces detailed explanations for compiler error codes. Internal skepticism suggested this feature might see limited uptake — but the data says otherwise. A significant share of Rust users actively consult compiler error explanations, a finding that challenges the assumption that they go largely unread.
Challenges and wishes about Rust
The stabilization of let chains and async closures in 2025 was met with clear enthusiasm — both features rank among the most actively used additions to the language. With those long-awaited items shipped, generic const expressions and improved trait methods have moved to the top of the most-wanted list. The rest of the feature wish list remained largely consistent with 2024.
On the productivity pain points front, the picture is similarly stable relative to 2024. Compile times and disk storage remain the top friction points. Debugging experience slipped from second to fourth place — a drop of roughly two percentage points — which prompted the team to launch a dedicated debugging survey to dig deeper into that shift.
Learning about Rust
Participation in both online and offline Rust learning communities — meetups, discussion forums, and similar resources — declined by a noticeable margin of around three percentage points. Open-ended responses suggest that at least some of this shift reflects developers turning to LLM-based tools for quick answers instead. That said, official documentation remains the preferred go-to reference, with reading source code directly coming in second.
Industry and community
The survey reinforces what many in the industry have already observed: demand for Rust developers continues to climb. Organizations are actively seeking Rust expertise, and the steady upward trend suggests this isn't a passing enthusiasm — Rust is consolidating its position in production codebases, with the total volume of Rust code in the wild growing year over year.
When asked about concerns for Rust's future, the results were predictable given the audience: most respondents simply want more Rust. That said, a persistent worry about increasing language complexity continues to surface — a tension the community will need to navigate carefully as the language matures.
One notable shift this year is a slight uptick in concern around developer and maintainer support. This is a known challenge, and active work is underway to address it. Both RustNL and the Rust Foundation have launched funding initiatives aimed at sustaining the people who keep the ecosystem running. The underlying problem is familiar across open source: skilled contributors burn out or move on after extended periods of unpaid labor, and retaining that talent requires structural financial support.
This data also carries a clear message for companies that ship products built on Rust: consider giving back to the ecosystem that makes your work possible. Options include joining the Rust Foundation, allocating paid work time for employees to contribute to Rust projects your organization depends on, or directing funds through platforms like OpenCollective, thanks.dev, or personal sponsorship channels such as GitHub Sponsors and Liberapay.
On a more positive note, trust in the Rust Foundation appears to be improving — a meaningful signal for the long-term health of the project's governance.
On the tooling side, the editor landscape is shifting. The Zed editor made a notable jump in respondent preferences this year, with Helix close behind. AI-assisted, agentic editors are also gaining ground — as the word cloud data reflects — and appear to be chipping away at the user bases of VSCode and IntelliJ based on the histogram data.
A special mention goes to the 11 developers still running Atom (we see you 👋), and to the steadfast Emacs and Vim contingent — classic choices that never seem to fully fade.
Finally, the survey collected demographic data on marginalized groups among all participants who completed the 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 figures have improved incrementally, but the overall picture remains sobering: people from marginalized groups represent a very small fraction of the Rust community. While Rust compares favorably to many other tech ecosystems on this front, the numbers are a clear reminder that sustained, deliberate effort is needed to make the project genuinely welcoming to everyone. That commitment to diversity and inclusion has always been a core value of the community — and these results underscore why it cannot be taken for granted.
Conclusions
This year's survey produced few surprises, but usefully confirmed several ongoing trends. For a deeper dive into the data, the full PDF report is available to download.
Our thanks go to all the volunteers who helped design and translate the survey, and to every participant who took the time to share their perspective on the state of the Rust community.
A look back
With this year marking a round-number milestone, here's an archive of past annual survey results for anyone who wants to trace the full arc of Rust's evolution: