Rust has clear signs of sustained developer interest, but the available evidence does not establish that both Rust and C are continuing to rise. Rust ranked as Stack Overflow’s most admired programming language in 2025, and the Rust Survey Team reported a continuing organizational hiring trend. Those findings measure different things from actual use, and they do not provide a comparable trend for C.
What does it mean for a programming language to “rise”?
There is no single census of programming-language popularity. A language can gain users, attract more hiring interest, see more public contributions, or rank higher in a popularity index. Those are related signals, but they are not interchangeable: admiration is not use, platform activity is not all software development, and a ranking position is not proof of growing adoption.
IEEE Spectrum’s 2025 ranking makes these distinctions explicit. It separates a ranking intended to reflect active use from rankings for employer demand and “zeitgeist,” and combines proxy signals whose weighting affects the results. Its data collection covered July and August 2025. IEEE Spectrum notes that AI-assisted coding may also weaken some public signals used to estimate interest. Stephen Cass describes the underlying limitation: “Because we can’t literally look over the shoulders of everyone who codes, including kids hacking on Minecraft servers or academic researchers developing new architectures, we rely on proxies to measure popularity.”
What the recent evidence says about Rust
Developers admire Rust, but that is not the same as adoption
In Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, Rust was the most admired programming language, at 72%. In this survey, “admired” means the share of respondents who currently use a technology and want to continue using it. It does not mean that 72% of all developers use Rust, nor does it show how much Rust use changed over time. The language question received 31,771 responses.
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Cargo, Rust’s package manager and build tool, was the most admired cloud development and infrastructure tool in that survey, at 71%. Stack Overflow associates Cargo’s result with Rust’s growth, but Cargo’s admiration score is not a direct measurement of Rust adoption.
The Rust survey points to hiring interest, with limits
The Rust Survey Team’s 2025 survey received 7,156 completed responses during a 30-day period from November 17 to December 17, 2025; the results were published March 2, 2026. The team says results largely resembled the previous year, with many differences below one percentage point, and cautions readers not to extrapolate broadly from roughly 7,000 responses.
On employment, the team says the survey confirmed a trend of organizations looking for more Rust developers. It interprets steady growth as a possible sign of structural market presence and a growing quantity of Rust code. That is a survey finding and the team’s interpretation—not a census of employers, a universal hiring forecast, or proof of adoption in every industry or region.
Interest comes with practical friction
The Rust survey still identified resource demands, including slow compile times and storage use, among non-trivial problems. Debugging moved from the second- to the fourth-most-cited problem, a shift of about two percentage points. These results offer useful context alongside enthusiasm: interest in Rust does not mean every team finds it effortless to use.
The team also reported a roughly three-percentage-point shift in attendance at online and offline learning communities. It suggested that some respondents may be moving questions to LLM tools, but that causal explanation is the team’s interpretation rather than an established finding.
Does the evidence show that C is rising too?
No comparable current figure in these sources establishes a continuing rise in C use or popularity. Rust’s admiration, hiring, or survey results cannot be used to infer a trend for C. Nor would C’s historical importance or a single ranking placement, on its own, show that its popularity is increasing.
A defensible claim about C would need a dated time series using a defined measure—for example, survey-reported use, employer demand, platform contribution activity, or a ranking’s specific trending category. The sources summarized here do not provide that comparison, so whether C is rising remains unresolved.
Why one platform’s growth does not settle the question
GitHub reported that TypeScript became its most-used language in August 2025 and gained more than one million contributors during the year. This is evidence about activity on GitHub, not a measure of every developer or all software work. It illustrates why claims about a language “rising” need to name both the measure and the period: a platform’s contributor activity, a survey’s reported use, hiring intentions, and developer admiration answer different questions.
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How to read a language-popularity claim
- Check the measure: Is the claim about people using a language, wanting to keep using it, being hired to use it, contributing on a platform, or a ranking?
- Check the population and period: A survey’s respondents or one platform’s contributors are not all developers. Look for the dates and who was counted.
- Compare like with like: A year-over-year change in reported use is not directly comparable to an admiration score or a ranking position.
- Look for a trend, not a snapshot: A single high score or ranking does not establish continued growth. A claim about growth needs comparable measurements over time.
Want to learn Rust?
The official online text of The Rust Programming Language is available, and the official book page also lists offline documentation installations and paperback and ebook editions from No Starch Press. The page says its current version assumes Rust 1.90.0 or later and uses Rust 2024 Edition idioms. The book is a learning resource, not evidence of Rust’s popularity; buying it is not necessary to access the online text.
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