Results of Rust Survey 2016 – early draft for internal usage

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F6oELZcO_ejX2oVk20hmiBWd4lQugfFahn7OOOOyKsw

by progval • 10 years ago

118 111 10 years ago

docs.google.com

EvgeniyZh• 10 years ago

Wow, ~180 people with projects more than 100000 lines.

krasin• 10 years ago

All / most of them are likely Servo contributors.

Servo: https://servo.org/

cmrx642• 10 years ago

Or rustc/libstd.

tomaka• 10 years ago

100k may seem like a lot, but if I do the sum of all lines of codes (exluding blank lines and comments) of the Rust projects where I'm the only contributor (or where other contributors are minor) I'm at around 61k lines of code.

Lines of code go up quicker than you think.

willvarfar• 10 years ago

The first diagram shows that 35.5% of respondents don't use, or stopped using, rust.

Its a shame they don't break this down between those who have never used it vs those who have stopped using it.

At the end of the results there's talk about why those who don't use rust don't use it, but again it doesn't separate out why people have never used it vs why people have stopped using it.

I imagine it would be a very interesting to have had this split.

Manishearth9• 10 years ago

Note that we tried to publicize the survey amongst non-Rustaceans, so I expect most of these respondents are those who never used it in the first place. We got an overwhelming positive response, especially in the freeform comments.

There's also:

Equally encouraging is seeing that once someone has become a Rust user, they tend to stick around and continue using it. One might expect a sharp drop-off if users became quickly disenchanted and moved onto other technologies. Instead, we see the opposite. Users that come in and stay past their initial experiences tend to stay long-term, with a fairly even spread between 3 months to 12 months (when we first went 1.0).

akerro2• 10 years ago

Thanks for your work guys. I took part in the survey when I found it on Reddit. Yesterday I started my first project in two new technologies, Rust and GTK. That's completely different experience and perspective of designing code after years of C++(Qt) and Java(backend). Now I wish I was earlier adopter :)

StavrosK• 10 years ago

In the "people who have never used it" camp, I just started learning Rust and wrote a toy program yesterday. I was very pleasantly surprised by how helpful people in the IRC channel were, they were very patient and eager to help.

I'm really liking everything I'm seeing in Rust so far.

viraptor3• 10 years ago

I'd also like to see that. I'm in the "temporarily stopped using" camp. I love it, I got to the level where I don't fight the language anymore, but facing reality - I don't have a reason to use it. Everything I do at the moment, I can finish faster in Python and I know it's enough. (sysadmin / deployment / security tools)

The moment I need good performance and safety (new protocol server?), I'll reach for Rust. But I don't have that many real problems where it's worth it.

EugeneOZ3• 10 years ago

I went further and now I write in Rust with the same speed as with PHP. And my benefits: awesome system of errors handling, enums, match patterns, easy and safe multithreading, MySQL shared prepared queries, and majority of bugs is being catched by compiler (thanks to strict typing and a lot of checks in compiler).

eximius2• 10 years ago

Hmmm. That 20% of Rust users identify as part of an 'underrepresented group' does not seem like poor number. I would naively guess that it is a larger percentage than exists in the overall technical population. If that's correct, then bravo Rust!

(If anyone knows about numbers along those lines, I'd love to hear about it.)

itxifxuf3• 10 years ago

Amazing how a bigger focus is placed on getting certain demographics to use a programming language rather than focusing on improvement of the language itself.

maggit• 10 years ago

Where did you get "bigger focus" from? It seems to me they are hard at work improving the language all the time.

dochtman• 10 years ago

I would argue that the language will benefit from having more diverse feedback.

kushti2• 10 years ago

This part of survey is really weird and full of American racist bigotry. What does "Person of color" mean considering people all around the globe? In Africa or India whites are super-minorities so should they vote as "persons of color"?

epoch19703• 10 years ago

What terms would you recommend that they use instead?

nutheracc2• 10 years ago

Yes, minority is geographical, yet somehow it's come to mean not white male, a western view point. Not sure how female keeps getting classified as minority.

dbaupp3• 10 years ago

You may be interested in the discussion on this topic from when the survey was posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/4ikawg/launching_the_...

lbn2• 10 years ago

How come there are as many women (47) answering this survey as trans people? Is there anything in the Rust community that is hostile to women but not trans people?

In fact trans people appear to be over-represented in this survey as 1.7% of people in it were trans compared to optimistic 0.3% of the US being transgender [0]

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-US-population-i...

k__• 10 years ago

Most female devs I know are trans women. So maybe they are over-represented in the dev-world in general?

viraptor3• 10 years ago

Hostile may be jumping to conclusions. It's a small number, and it's a self-selected sample. Small change in any of the numbers will result in big ratio change. Unless someone actually claims hostile behaviour, why expect it?

Either way, the trans population is very much overrepresented in the survey. You took one of the sources from the link which claims 0.3%. The next source which I would trust (DSM-5 stats) claims 0.005-0.014% natal male and 0.002-0.003% natal female for gender dysphoria.

lbn2• 10 years ago

The reason I said hostile is that in most discussions on Hacker News and Reddit a lot of people argue that the only reason women are so under-represented in tech is that all the guys are very hostile to women. This survey goes against that. For some reason they refuse to believe that some things are more interesting to women than men and vice versa.

qznc2• 10 years ago

By large margin, users are often grabbing vim to do their Rust work in

I would rather assume the reverse theory. Vim users are more likely to use new languages since they don't expect complex IDE support. Or maybe just: Early adopter and vim user correlates.

allan_s• 10 years ago

(disclaimer: I'm a vim user)

Also maybe because rust and vim appeal to the same argument of "performance/only come with the stuff you need"

kevincox• 10 years ago

To be fair. With YouCompleteMe and rust-racer support the tooling for Rust in vim is solid.

qznc2• 10 years ago

That is only completion? IDEs provide more. Refactoring and Debugging, for example.

(I'm a vimmer myself, but that is what I hear other people complain about)

weberc22• 10 years ago

I disagree. I'm used to vim-go, and the difference between that and YCM + rust-racer is stark. Rust really needs to catch up here before it can get a larger share of my hobby time.

panic2• 10 years ago

According to the survey, ~16% of people experience breakage with minor upgrades. Isn't this a pretty serious violation of semver?

jjnoakes2• 10 years ago

I don't know the details in rust's case, but I wouldn't consider it a violation of semver if the code which broke in a minor update was doing bad things (maybe accidentally exploiting a bug or limitation in the language or implementation, probably by violating some requirement that wasn't checked properly, etc) and simply couldn't be correct code if left alone.

panic2• 10 years ago

How do you define a "bad thing"? The semver spec is quite clear about "even the tiniest backwards incompatible changes" (http://semver.org/#if-even-the-tiniest-backwards-incompatibl...) requiring a major version bump.

Manishearth9• 10 years ago

I believe (but cannot verify) that these breakages were due to libraries breaking, especially libraries which evolve in lockstep with Rust internals like aster.

The main reason I believe this is because each release is tested against the entire ecosystem, and stability regressions are fixed. The only time that breakages in the ecosystem are okay are during a soundness fix where the broken library was doing something unsound.

mook3• 10 years ago

Doesn't the large portion of people using unstable libraries / things depending on unstable internals mean that the versioning isn't covering a large enough API? I feel like blaming the user isn't really going to help make the ecosystem more stable.

(Context: I went through the tutorial at one point and got really fed up that it wasn't possible to do it without involving crates because there wasn't any random number generation in the standard library.)

I of course understand that you folks are still working hard on it and it'll come in time; it's just that all other recent languages (Go, Ruby, Python, heck even the . Net and JVM ones) come with a large and usable standard library.

lifthrasiir2• 10 years ago

The Rust compiler has been very stable after 1.0. The issue lies in the ecosystem, and people is still figuring out the best design and/or solution for doing things, while occasionally breaking them. The biggest ecosystem breakage so far was termed "libcpocalypse", which was a massive hit for everyone (transitively) depending on libc crate for FFI. The proper resolution is still in under way [1].

[1] https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/solve-std-os-raw-c-void/32...

llogiq• 10 years ago

This percentage includes people using explicitly unstable things (e.g. me).

desdiv• 10 years ago

48.8% of Rust users use nightly, 23 percentage points among them use both stable and nightly, which means 25.8% of Rust users use only nightly.

Is it just me or does that seem exceedingly high? I'm guessing that a good deal of them are Rust language/core lib developers?

progval2• 10 years ago

I personnally use nightly without being a core dev, because Rust is not available in Debian Stable so I just compile it from Git.

dmit• 10 years ago

Also a factor is that there are very useful libraries that either can only be used in nightly, or are more ergonomic to use in nightly. Usually because they rely on compiler internals or unstable language features. This is mentioned as one of the points under "Challenges for Rust".

cmrx642• 10 years ago

I use nightly for osdev. No other option.

Argorak7• 10 years ago

Please note that this is a leak of an early draft for the rust community teams internal usage and should be marked as such.

Do consider all numbers undiscussed and not cleaned up for flaws (we'll document the cleanups and the reasonings).

-- Florian // rust-community team

progval2• 10 years ago

Sorry, I saw it on IRC and didn't know it wasn't supposed to be public

Manishearth9• 10 years ago

We do most of our work in public, so it is public, just not intended for distribution :)

(In the case of the survey the analysis itself was conducted privately, because the data contains personally identifying information. But usually things are done in the public.)

Argorak7• 10 years ago

Happens, I see the need to clarify a bit around #rust-community there :). No harm done.

dang2• 10 years ago

We added that to the title and buried the submission. One thing we've learned over the years is that it's fine to wait until a story is actually ready before discussing it.

akavel• 10 years ago

To author: would it be possible to improve the bar graphs, so that they were sorted by value, not by label? I believe it would make reading them much easier, and make them more informative [or, "deobfuscate" them]. (I mean those like "editors", etc., not "how long I know Rust" where the labels introduce sensible order.)

jntrnr• 10 years ago

Author here.

Hi all - thanks for the interest in the survey! The Rust community team is still working the blog post (this link was to an early draft), and we're looking forward to posting it when it's done.

epoch19703• 10 years ago

I think this survey was very poorly publicized. As somebody who only dabbles in Rust, this is the first I have heard of this survey. I am sure that others are in the same boat as I am. We would have participated, but we learned about it weeks after it closed!

Only now do I see the blog article, and a submission here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11661056] that got no traction. I don't remember seeing any sort of a notice on the main Rust web site.

The fact that many participants were excluded, albeit unintentionally, makes me really question the completeness, and hence the validity and usefulness, of this survey data.

Argorak7• 10 years ago

This survey was publicized in all official channels including this week in rust, mentioned in the 1 year of rust announcement, on Hacker News (we cannot control traction), on the subreddit, the users forum, our Twitter account (where it also got huge traction) and literally all our other venues. We got a huge amount of replies.

I'm not sure how this is "poorly publicized".

cesarb• 10 years ago

This link is asking for a login. Is there anywhere one can read the results without creating an account?

Manishearth9• 10 years ago

This was a draft blog post intended for review which was posted on HN, and has been made private for now.

nutheracc2• 10 years ago

The link is now locked. Can we replace it with something interesting? Or a cached copy?

steveklabnik6• 10 years ago

There will be some kind of actual communication of this data at some point, quite possibly on the official Rust blog. This was a rough draft of the post that was leaked.

logingone• 10 years ago

Yes, put something interesting in its place please, rust-related.

themihai• 10 years ago

Is it just me or the doc requires permission?

steveklabnik6• 10 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11960483

dang2• 10 years ago

We've closed this thread to new accounts because new accounts have taken it into the weeds of angry troll war.

Results of Rust Survey 2016 – early draft for internal usage

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