Developer field research firm SlashData recently released the 20th edition of its Developer Country Rankings, which shows that while JavaScript remains the most popular programming language with the most developers in the first quarter of this year, Rust has become the fastest growing.
2021Q1 Programming language list: JavaScript has the most developers, and Rust is growing the fastest
SlashData’s survey, which covered more than 19,000 respondents from 155 countries/territories, ranked slightly differently from other languages from GitHub, RedMonk, StackOverflow and Tiobe.
SlashData conducts the survey twice a year. Its last survey estimated the size of the JavaScript community at 12.4 million, including TypeScript and CoffeeScript, which are also based on the same ECMAScript standard. By the end of the first quarter, that number had grown to 13.8 million.
Python came in second with 10.1 million developers, followed by Java with 9.4 million. This ranking is the same as a recent survey by developer analytics firm RedMonk based on GitHub and StackOverflow.
According to SlashData, Python is the language with the largest growth in the number of developers, 70% of whom are focused on using it for related machine learning work, Much of this can be attributed to machine learning libraries like Google’s TensorFlow and Facebook’s PyTorch and NumPy.
For Rust, another theme language in data science, SlashData says Rust is currently used by only 17% of the population, but it’s the programming language with the highest percentage increase in developers over the past 12 months, but the net increase is smaller than Python because of its low base.
Although Rust is not widely used, this year its community stepped out of Mozilla’s “constraints” and created its own Rust Foundation, which now has access to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google and Mozilla support.
Rust may become the new favorite of big tech factories
Java and Kotlin are popular choices for Android developers; C and C++ are popular choices for operating system and underlying developers. However, as a niche modern system programming language among many languages, Rust has gradually been favored by major enterprises in the past two years.
At the end of 2020, Rust official released its 2020 Rust Survey after surveying 8,323 developers worldwide. According to the report, Rust developers have a high level of user engagement, with 83% of respondents saying they use the language all the time.
It is well known that security, performance, concurrency, and other features are advantages when it comes to Rust. Rust provides memory security guarantees by using a combination of compile-time and run-time checks to enforce object lifetime/ownership and ensure that memory access is valid. This security is achieved while providing performance comparable to C and C++. Rust also reduces the need for sandboxes, giving developers more overhead space to introduce new, safer, lighter features.
Last year, the AWS open source team announced the hiring of Rust compiler co-founder Felix Klock to work on further improvements to Rust in the future. Apple has also expressed interest in porting C code to Rust, hoping to jump on the Rust coding bandwagon and transition C to Rust on linux-based server-side platforms. Microsoft also said in an interview that C/C++ is not up to the task of writing mission-critical software. There is a great need for high-performance, memory-safe programming languages to develop underlying systems, and the best choice on the market today is Rust.
Google recently announced that it is recommending developers use the Rust programming language to develop operating systems for security reasons. It says it has been adding Rust support to Android open source projects for the past 18 months. But adding a new language to The Android platform is a huge undertaking. Some tool chains and dependencies need to be maintained, test infrastructure and tools must be updated, and developers need to be trained.
Some references:
1, https://www.zdnet.com/article… 2. “To make Android Safer, Google recommends Developers Use Rust to write System code”
