State of Rust Survey 2016
Good start for a year one survey.<p>I&#x27;m surprised there aren&#x27;t more Java devs responding. Rust is characterized as a systems programming language, but Java is a language that has made incursions down into the C&#x2F;C++ &quot;systems programming&quot; space over the last decade than any other language, and it is ripe for disruption by Rust due to Rust&#x27;s superior efficiency.<p>In agreement with the survey, I believe this will not happen until there&#x27;s good IDE support, and until more hardened enterprise-y dependencies&#x2F;libraries emerge (e.g., database access to things like Oracle via OCI or ODBC). After an extended run with Rust, I returned to the Java 8 world briefly shocked to find a) how much more productive a good IDE made me and b) how productive such an IDE made me in terms of writing inefficient code! In there lies an opportunity. Rust should be attacking Java from below. The waste in a typical Java stack should make us all weep. The only barrier I see is perception around the ownership learning curve.<p>In bouncing between languages, what Rust lacks (and what other languages have) is the ability to pass the sip test...the first experience. Out of the box, untuned Java screams due to JIT and the IDEs; it&#x27;s only far later when you try to do something serious that you feel the cost of the abstractions that help productivity, and you&#x27;re in a forest of JVM tuning options and writing non-idiomatic Java code in order to get reliably performance and behavior. Rust requires too much faith at this point--that the microbenchmarks matter and that investment in mastering the borrow checker will pay off with more stable performance and behavior later.<p>Other points: Cargo is underrated. Traits over primitives is a huge win over Java&#x27;s boxed collections. Community involvement and health is underrated.<p>Keep up the good work.