Rust again tops StackOverflow's ranking of most loved programming languages

Rust again recognized as the most loved programming language according to StackOverflow

The annual StackOverflow 2024 developer survey has once again brought victory to the systems programming language Rust. For the ninth consecutive year, Rust takes the top spot in the "Most Loved Programming Language" category, garnering an impressive 83% positive feedback from those who have worked with it.

For the PythonLib educational community, this is an excellent reason to pay attention to a language that is rapidly gaining popularity and is increasingly used in high-load projects, web development, and even education.

Why do developers love Rust so much?

Unlike many other languages, Rust offers a unique combination of speed and safety. Here are the key reasons for its success:

• Memory safety without a garbage collector. The ownership and borrowing system prevents entire classes of memory-related errors at compile time.
• Performance on par with C and C++. Rust compiles to native code and has no virtual machine overhead, making it ideal for systems programming, games, and embedded devices.
• Modern tooling. The built-in package manager Cargo, excellent documentation, and a friendly community make learning comfortable.
• Growing ecosystem. Libraries for web frameworks (Actix, Rocket), data analysis (Polars), and even graphics work are actively developing.

What does this mean for Python developers?

For PythonLib readers, it is especially interesting that Rust and Python are increasingly becoming partners, not competitors. Many projects use Rust to write high-performance modules that are then wrapped into Python libraries. Examples:

• Pydantic v2 — part of the code was rewritten in Rust to speed up data validation.
• Polars — an alternative to Pandas, written in Rust and showing multiple times speed improvement.
• PyO3 — a tool for writing Python extensions in Rust.

Thus, learning Rust can be a logical next step for a Python developer who wants to understand memory management more deeply, improve the performance of their projects, or master systems programming.

Language prospects

Rust is actively being adopted into the Linux kernel, used in browsers (Firefox, Servo), in cloud services from AWS and Microsoft Azure, and in cryptocurrencies. The StackOverflow community notes not only the love for the language but also the growing interest from employers — Rust developer salaries remain among the highest in the industry.

If you are not yet familiar with Rust, now is the time to pay attention to it. Start by learning the basic concepts through the official book "The Rust Programming Language" or practical tutorials on PythonLib — and perhaps next year you too will vote for Rust as your most loved language.