Rust Tops the Charts Again đŚ
Todayâs Issue: The Dangers of Mixing Rust and C Memory Allocators, How To Make a 3D Game, and the Generativity Pattern in Rust
Hello Rustaceans
I hope you had a productive week last week, letâs learn.
In this issue, weâll discuss this yearâs Stack Overflow Developer Survey, present you a Q/A interview, spotlight an amazing Rust project, and share ten (10) incredible links of the week.
Hereâs issue 79 for you!
THE MAIN NEWS
Rust Tops the Charts Again đŚ
If thereâs one place us developers gather to lovingly roast our tools and confess our coding crushes, itâs the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey. And this yearâs edition? Pure gold. Itâs basically group therapy for us tech folks, plus charts.
And once again, it also gives us the perfect excuse to write about everyoneâs favourite low-level heartthrob which this newsletter is all about: Rust.
For the tenth year in a row, Rust has once again snagged the âMost Admired Languageâ crown, with 72% of devs swooning over its memory-safe magic.
But itâs not just Rust basking in the glory. Cargo, Rustâs trusty package manager, is now officially at the top of infra and build tools, with 70.8% of developers adoring it. Yeah. A build tool. Adored.
And speaking of stealing the show is uv, the Python package manager written in Rust that is the âMost Admired New Techâ with a 74.2% developer appreciation. It seems like Python devs have officially handed the keys over to Rust to clean up their dependency mess.
Rust is even making web dev less painful. For web devs stuck in JavaScriptâs drama, Axumâs your escape hatch. Axum got a measly 2.8% usage but a wild 76.4% admiration score: once you try it, youâre hooked and ready to write sonnets about it.
And letâs not forget RustRover, JetBrains' new Rust IDE which is turning heads with 62.6% admiration.
It's also worth mentioning that this year's survey had a lower turnout, with just over 49,000 responses compared to 65,000 from the previous year.
Despite the concerning drop in participation, Rust remains a favourite. If you're curious on how other tools fared on, check out the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey.
RUST Q/A INTERVIEW đŚ
Q: What excites you most about Rustâs future in the next 5 years?
A: âI'm excited for Rust to become boring. Wait, wait: in this context, boring is good. Yes, Rust is cool and all, but real users don't care about that. They care about software that works, doesn't kill them with X-rays, lands softly on Mars instead of crashing, and doesn't leak their bank details. In other words, durable software. Rust is the obvious language for writing it, because instead of worrying about nil pointers, we can worry about âDoes this program actually do what it's supposed to?â
Programming languages don't matter: only good software matters. Stop saying âHey, our stuff is written in Rust!â and start saying âHey, our software works!â Isn't it just forehead-smackingly common sense that we should be using a memory-safe language that prioritises correctness and reliability? Choosing Rust should no longer be worthy of a headline.
We've wasted enough time fussing and fretting over which language has microscopic advantages over another. Rust has enough mass and momentum now to make it a sensible default. I'm just going to call it: Rust wins. I'm excited that we finally have a decent language, but I'm much more excited about us using it to write some awesome software. Let's crack on.â
About the Respondent: John Arundel is a Rust writer and teacher who blogs at Bitfield Consulting.
Connect with John: Bitfield Consulting
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT đĄ
Git-cliff
Git-cliff is a changelog generator written in Rust that automatically writes your release notes.
Writing changelogs can be tedious. Youâre often stuck, sifting through commits, trying to make sense of commit messages, and formatting it all into something readable.
Git-cliff solves this pain-point for you by automating the process, parsing your Git history with conventional commits or custom regex magic, so you can focus on coding.
Why Git-cliff Rocks
Insanely Customizable - You can tweak templates with a config file to match your projectâs vibe.
Git-cliff groks your feat:, fix:, and chore: commits, turning them into neat changelog sections without you lifting a finger.
Monorepo Mastery - It handles complex monorepo setups like a champ, keeping your changelog tidy across multiple packages.
And another reason why you know this project is fine is because Orhun (Creator of Ratatui) is behind it.
Git-cliff is a community oriented project and is open-source on GitHub at https://github.com/orhun/git-cliff.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK đ
Rust v1.89.0 got released introducing explicit inferred arguments for const generics, a new lint for mismatched lifetime syntaxes, and support for additional x86 target features and intrinsics.
Rust Project goals update for July is out. It reviews Rustâs project goals for the first half of 2025, including key advances in async Rust (such as asyncâfn in traits, generators, and Pin ergonomics), Linux toolchain support, and community collaboration during RustWeek 2025.
Notashes wrote about the dangers of mixing Rust and C memory allocators, with experiments demonstrating metadata mismatches, significant memory overhead, persistent data after freeing, and performance impacts from cache effects.
VinĂcius detailed the process of building a simple hash map in Rust, explaining how hash functions and buckets manage key-value pairs to achieve O(1) time complexity, while covering implementation details like handling hash collisions, capacity growth, and borrowed keys.
Jan Hohenheim from Bevy gave a talk on Rustunit on how he makes 3D games.[video]
Ray Jenkins and Mike Heffner from Rotel blogged about Fast and Efficient OpenTelemetry Collection in Rust, introducing Rotel, an open-source OpenTelemetry collector designed for high performance and resource efficiency with up to 75% less memory and 50% less CPU usage.
Jeff Kao gave as a sneak peak on how they replaced Elasticsearch and MongoDB with Rust and RocksDB at Radar. Bet that codebase is humming now!
Tim McNamara interviewed David Sankel (Adobe engineer and member of the C++ Standards Committee) about Rust and C++ interoperability, discussing ongoing efforts to make it easier for the two languages to work together. [video]
Arhan Chaudhary wrote a guide on the generativity pattern in Rust, a compile-time technique combining typestate and GhostCell to enforce data source consistency, demonstrated through permutation composition, and introduces Crystal Durhamâs generativity crate for improved ergonomics.
Liam Gray open-sourced rapidhash, an extremely fast, high-quality, non-cryptographic hash function for platform independent compile-time and run-time hashing in rust.
Bonus:
RustConf (The largest gathering of Rustaceans) is happening next month, grab your ticket now, because weâre not buying the âI missed itâ excuse this time!
CodeCrafters: Become a Better Rust Engineer
CodeCrafters created amazing Rust courses that push your skills beyond the basics.
Youâll have fun building real-world projects from scratch, including Git, Docker, Redis, Kafka, SQLite, Grep, BitTorrent, HTTP Server, an Interpreter, and DNS.
The courses are self-paced, so you can learn at your own speed. If youâre itching to level up your Rust skills, these courses are perfect for you.
Join for free and get 40% off when you upgrade. [affiliate]
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I havenât managed to fix my internet yet but been working from a cafe. Have a good week ahead and stay curious.
That's all for now, Rustaceans.
John & Elley.