It is quite rare to see the creation of a programming language which captures the attention and interest of the engineering community such as we have seen with Rust. Over the last 2-years Rust users have grown from a modest 600,000 in 2020 to now over 3 million in 2023.

According to LinkedIn data there are now 1,800 brave souls who are self-proclaimed “Rust Engineers”, and a cool 91,000 engineers who mentioned Rust in their profiles.

Unsurprisingly the growth is centralised around the US with the FAANG group of businesses making up the majority of that group. That’s not to say that we can confirm they are using Rust, just that the engineers who work there are talking about Rust in their profiles.

India and the Ukraine, interestingly take second and third place.

In a recent article written on ‘The New Stack’ - https://thenewstack.io/rust-whats-next-for-the-fast-growing-programming-language/ - they interview the executive director of the Rust Foundation around the growth, who stated that the majority was from the community of C and C++ engineers, and that the most significant use case for Rust at the moment was in AR and VR applications.

It’s a good article and gets more technical than I am going to here.

Ten years ago, with Ruby on Rails, and more recently with Golang, the start-up community embraced the languages and bought them into the mainstream. There was a clear use-case for each at the time.

Meta, according to LinkedIn have one of the largest pools of engineers with Rust mentioned on their profile, at 420. With the growth of AR/VR and what seems an already enterprise scale project underway with the Metaverse, it could be a very interesting time for engineering and a great opportunity for engineers interested in AR/VR or Rust to start learning the new language ahead of the trickle down in to the start-up/ scale-up community and possible adoption across the rest of the industry.