Rust as a Revolutionary Language

Scope of Rust in IT Industry

Rust is a multi-paradigm system programming language focused on safety, especially safe concurrency. Rust is syntactically similar to C++, but is designed to provide better memory safety while maintaining high performance.

Rust is a systems programming language meant to replace a lot of C and C++ development—which is why it's surprising to see this language's popularity growing the fastest among web developers. It makes a little more sense when you find out that the language was created at Mozilla, who is looking to give web developers that are forced to write low-level code a better option that's more performant than PHP, Ruby, Python, or JavaScript. Rust was also crowned the "most loved" technology in StackOverflow's 2016 developer survey (meaning it had the most users who wanted to keep using it).

Rust and its genealogy

First, let’s start with a quick history lesson. Rust is a new language relative to its predecessors (most importantly C, which preceded it by 38 years), but its genealogy creates its multiparadigm approach. Rust is considered a C-like language, but the other features it includes create advantages over its predecessors (see Figure 1).

First, Rust is heavily influenced by Cyclone (a safe dialect of C and an imperative language), with some aspects of object-oriented features from C++. But, it also includes functional features from languages like Haskell and OCaml. The result is a C-like language that supports multiparadigm programming (imperative, functional, and object oriented).

Figure 1. Rust and its family tree

FUTURE OF RUST

1. Popularity Scale

Stack Overflow conducts annual survey to determine the status of different programming languages and the choices of the developers and programmers across the globe. Since the participants are either learning or working on the programming language, it gives a fair idea around how a particular language is expected to perform in the current year and the next couple of years to follow.
In the Stack Overflow Developer survey conducted in year 2015, the first year since the birth of Rust, developers ranked Rust 3rd in the list with 73.8% people including it in their ‘Most Loved’ programming language list. Rust went a step ahead in 2016 and topped the charts with 79.1% people including it in their ‘Most-Loved’ list. What makes this list all the more relevant is the fact that in the year 2016, out of all the participants, 67.8% were full time employees working as developers or programmers. Says a lot about what the future holds for Rust, doesn’t it?

2. Salary Scale

What is the benefit of using a popular and in demand programming language if its effects do not reflect in our salary accounts every month? Keeping that in mind, we have also looked at the top paying techs and where Rust stands among the different programming languages in terms of salary generation.
 O’Reilly conducts software development salary surveys on an annual basis capturing data from working professionals about their choice of programming languages, the languages they would like to learn, the languages that they believe would have a bright future and their current salary with the technology they are working on. According to the survey, Rust is expected to overtake C++ and is currently in the most wanted list of developers. Further, Stack overflow’s development survey of 2015 says that a Rust developer gets 131% of the an average developer’s salaries.

Is This the Right Time to Learn Rust?
It is quite understandable if you’re wondering if this might be a little too early to call Rust a great success given that it is just two years old. However, for a language that has achieved so much in just two years, it is only a matter of time before it climbs the list of top programming languages. So, the question is, do you want to be at the top when that happens, or would you prefer to scramble to learn Rust when you realize it truly is in high demand?