Nearly half of all companies now use Rust in production, survey finds
A decade into tracking the Rust programming language, the 2025 State of Rust Survey, released this week, paints a picture of a language that has moved well past its early-adopter phase and is quietly consolidating inside enterprise codebases around the world.
The survey, conducted by the Rust Survey Team from November 17 to December 17, 2025, drew 7,156 responses. While that represents a slight dip from last year’s 7,310, the team says the numbers reflect a maturing community rather than a retreating one. “Overall, no big surprises and a few trends confirmed,” the survey team writes in its analysis.
Non-trivial use
Nearly half of all organizations represented in the survey (48.8%) report making non-trivial use of Rust, up from 38.7% in 2023. That’s a 10-point jump in two years, and the survey team describes the trend as structural. This suggests that Rust has moved beyond hobbyist and systems-programmer territory.
“The steady growth may indicate a structural market presence of Rust in companies,” the survey says. “Codebases consolidate, and the quantity of Rust code overall keeps increasing.”
That consolidation is apparent in how developers are using the language day to day. Some 55.1% of respondents say they now use Rust daily, the highest rate recorded across four years of tracking. And 56.8% rate themselves as productive Rust writers, up sharply from 42.3% in 2022.
Andrew Cornwall, an analyst at Forrester Research, tells The New Stack that he doesn’t see large-scale adoption of Rust at the enterprise.
“[Rust is] finding a place as a substitute for C among some developers,” Cornwall says. “However, outside of embedded devices, the amount of C written at most enterprises is dwarfed by the amount of Python and Java. Rust also faces competition from ecosystems like Go, which are close in speed but include a garbage collector that can make development easier for both people and agents.”
Rust has gained traction in organizations that provide software and services to the federal government, which calls for the use of memory-safe languages for critical systems.
According to the survey, the top enterprise deployment domains are server-side and backend applications at 51.7%, followed by cloud computing applications at 25.3%, and distributed systems at roughly 22%. Computer security and embedded systems round out the top five, underscoring Rust’s particular appeal in contexts where memory safety and performance are non-negotiable.
Other findings
The top reason non-users give for staying away is simply that they haven’t gotten around to it yet — cited by 60.8% of that group — rather than difficulty, missing libraries, or community concerns. That’s a meaningful change in posture.
For organizations already running Rust in production, 84.8% say Rust has helped them achieve their goals, 78.5% say adoption was worth the cost, and 65.4% say they would use it again. 31% of respondents acknowledged adoption challenges.
Developers say they are satisfied with Rust’s pace of evolution, with 57.6% saying they are happy with how fast Rust is moving (25.5% wish it would move faster).
Meanwhile, the stabilization of two long-awaited features in 2025 — let chains and async closures — landed well with the community. Generic const expressions and improved trait methods have now risen to the top items on the community wish list.
Compile times remain the most persistent source of frustration, the survey shows. More than 27% of respondents call slow compilation a significant problem, and it has held that position across multiple survey cycles. High disk usage from build artifacts is a close second. The Rust team has acknowledged both issues but has yet to deliver a satisfactory resolution.
An interesting finding involves how developers are learning and getting help with Rust. There was a noticeable dip in attendance at meetups, forums, and other community learning spaces, prompting the survey team to flag what it sees as an emerging shift: developers are increasingly routing their questions to LLMs rather than to community channels. Word clouds from open-ended responses prominently feature ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini alongside traditional resources like The Rust Programming Language book and official documentation.
Now in its tenth year, the State of Rust Survey shows that Rust in 2025 is a language that has earned its place in production infrastructure.
