Rust leaps forward in language popularity index

Rust has leaped to its highest position ever in the monthly Tiobe index of language popularity, scaling to the 13^th spot this month, with placement in the top 10 anticipated in an upcoming edition.

Previously, Rust has never gone higher than 17^th place in the Tiobe Programming Index. Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen attributed Rust’s ascent in the just-released July index to a February 2024 US White House report recommending Rust over C/C+, for safety reasons. He also credited the growing community and ecosystem support for the language. “Rust is finally moving up. After the tailwind of the US government, which recently announced to recommend moving from C/C++ to Rust for security reasons, things are going fast for Rust,” Jansen said. “The community is growing, including the number of third-party libraries and tools. In short, Rust is preparing itself for a top 10 position in the Tiobe index.”

Rust is billed as being fast and memory-safe, with no runtime or garbage collector. It can power performance-critical services, run on embedded devices, and integrate with other languages, proponents say. Still, C++ in particular has done well recently in climbing the index, even after the US White House report, rising to second place in June.

Software quality services vendor Tiobe’s monthly index bases ratings on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors pertaining to languages, examining websites such as Google, Amazon,  Wikipedia, and more than 20 others to determine the monthly numbers. The top 10 programming languages for July 2024 are as follows:

1. Python, with a rating of 16.12%
2. C++, 10.34%
3. C, 9.48%
4. Java, 8.59%
5. C#, 6.72%
6. JavaScript, 3.79%
7. Go (golang), 2.19%
8. Visual Basic, 2.08%
9. Fortran, 2.05%
10. SQL, 2.04%

In the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index, which assesses how often languages are searched on in Google, the top 10 languages for July 2024 are as follows.

1. Python, with a 29.35% share
2. Java, 15.6%
3. JavaScript, 8.49%
4. C#, 6.9%
5. C/C++, 6.37%
6. R, 4.73%
7. PHP, 4.49%
8. TypeScript, 2.96%
9. Swift, 2.78%
10. Rust, 2.55%

More on Rust:

• Safety off: Programming in Rust with `unsafe`
• What’s new in Rust 1.76
• 6 Rust programming mistakes to watch out for