Why You Should Learn Rust

I spend most of my working day in TypeScript. I like the speed of the JavaScript ecosystem, and I especially like npm: install a package, import it, and keep moving.

Rust is a very different language. The compiler is stricter, ownership takes time to understand, and code that looks reasonable in another language may not compile at all. That learning curve is real.

It is also exactly why Rust is worth learning.

Rust gives you low-level performance without asking you to accept low-level memory bugs as part of the job. It has serious industry adoption, a package workflow that feels surprisingly familiar, and a community that genuinely enjoys using it.

Here are the six reasons I think more developers should learn Rust.

1. Developers who use Rust want to keep using it

Rust was the most admired programming language in both the 2024 and 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Surveys. It received an 83% admiration score in 2024 and 72% in 2025.

"Admired" does not mean "most used." JavaScript, Python, Java, and several other languages still have much larger user bases. Stack Overflow defines admiration as the percentage of developers who used a technology and want to continue using it.

That distinction makes the result more interesting. Rust is not winning because everyone is required to use it. It is winning because people who have dealt with the borrow checker, written real programs, and experienced the tradeoffs still want to come back.

Developer satisfaction is not proof that a language is right for every project. It is a strong signal that the difficult parts lead somewhere useful.

2. Rust is now part of Linux kernel development

The Linux kernel has traditionally been the territory of C. Rust support entered the mainline kernel in version 6.1, and the current Linux kernel documentation includes Rust support behind CONFIG_RUST.

Linux is not being rewritten in Rust. C remains the primary language, and Rust support continues to mature. The important point is that kernel developers considered Rust valuable enough to bring it into one of the most performance-sensitive and reliability-critical codebases in the world.

Kernel code deals with drivers, hardware, concurrency, and memory directly. A use-after-free or data race is not a minor UI bug. Rust offers a way to build new kernel components with stronger safety guarantees while retaining the control systems programmers need.

You may never write a kernel driver. Learning the language still teaches you the same habits: make ownership clear, model state carefully, and force invalid behavior out of the happy path.

3. Rust is fast without a garbage collector

Rust compiles to native machine code and does not require a garbage collector or a large runtime. The official Rust site describes it as suitable for performance-critical services, embedded devices, and integration with other languages.

That makes Rust a strong choice for work where latency, throughput, memory use, or binary size matters:

• Command-line tools
• Network services
• Databases and data infrastructure
• Game engines
• Embedded software
• Desktop applications
• Performance-sensitive parts of a larger system

Fast does not mean every Rust program automatically beats every C++, Zig, or Go program. Algorithms, allocations, I/O, compiler settings, and implementation quality matter more than the language logo. In my systems-language benchmark, Rust and Zig led the memory workload, while the CPU workload was effectively a ten-language tie.

The real advantage is the performance ceiling. Rust lets you control allocation and data layout without making a tracing garbage collector part of every program. You can build predictable, efficient software and still use high-level abstractions such as iterators, enums, pattern matching, and generics.

4. The compiler prevents entire classes of bugs

Rust's ownership system is the feature that makes the language feel difficult at first. Every value has an owner, references follow borrowing rules, and the compiler checks that references cannot outlive the data they point to.

Those rules let safe Rust prevent many problems before the program runs:

• Use-after-free bugs
• Double frees
• Dangling references
• Null-pointer access through ordinary references
• Data races between threads
• Accidental mutation through shared references

Rust also makes failure explicit. Option<T> represents a value that may be absent. Result<T, E> represents an operation that may fail. The compiler makes you handle those possibilities instead of letting them hide behind null, exceptions, or undocumented return values.

This does not make Rust software bug-free. You can still write incorrect business logic, create deadlocks, exhaust memory, or use unsafe incorrectly. The promise is narrower and more useful: in safe Rust, the compiler eliminates many memory-safety and thread-safety mistakes that other systems languages leave for runtime, production, or a security researcher to discover.

At first, the compiler feels like an obstacle. Later, it feels like a teammate reviewing every change before it ships.

5. The community is active and growing

A programming language is more than its syntax. You need documentation, maintainers, libraries, examples, answers, jobs, and people willing to help when the compiler message still makes no sense after the fifth read.

Rust has all of them. The official community includes a users forum, an internals forum, Zulip groups, conferences, and more than 90 meetups across over 35 countries. The documentation is unusually strong, from the free Rust Book to generated API documentation for the standard library and third-party crates.

The 2025 State of Rust Survey also reported steady growth in organizational hiring plans and in the amount of Rust code being written. Rust is no longer only an interesting language for side projects. Companies are building real infrastructure and products with it.

The community is not perfect, and the ecosystem is younger than C++ or Java. Some areas have competing libraries, incomplete documentation, or APIs that change faster than you would want. But the direction is clear: Rust has moved beyond the experimental stage without losing the energy that made it interesting.

6. Cargo and crates make the tooling feel modern

Cargo may be my favorite part of Rust.

If you come from JavaScript, the basic model feels familiar. crates.io is the central package registry, similar to npm. Libraries and programs are distributed as crates, while Cargo handles dependencies, builds, commands, publishing, and reproducible version resolution.

The normal workflow is small and consistent:

cargo new my-app
cd my-app
cargo add serde --features derive
cargo check
cargo run
cargo build --release

Cargo.toml plays a role similar to package.json, and Cargo.lock records resolved dependency versions. Cargo also supports workspaces for multi-package repositories, feature flags, custom registries, examples, benchmarks, and documentation generation.

The best part is how unified it feels. JavaScript projects often assemble a package manager, compiler, formatter, linter, task runner, and test runner from separate tools. Rust gives the ecosystem a shared foundation through Cargo, rustfmt, Clippy, and rustup.

Cargo does not make the Rust ecosystem as large as npm. It makes it much easier to trust that a Rust project you clone will follow a workflow you already understand.

Rust will change how you write other languages

You do not need to replace TypeScript, Go, Python, or C++ to benefit from learning Rust.

Rust changes how you think about ownership, mutation, error handling, and concurrency. After spending time with it, you start noticing hidden allocations, ambiguous state, unchecked null values, and unclear resource lifetimes in other languages. Even when you return to a garbage-collected language, you write more deliberate code.

Should every frontend developer rebuild their next website in Rust? No. Use the language that fits the product and the team. But if you build backend services, developer tools, infrastructure, desktop software, embedded systems, or anything performance-sensitive, Rust deserves a place on your learning list.

Start with The Rust Programming Language, build a small command-line tool, and let the compiler teach you. The first week may be frustrating. Keep going. The moment ownership clicks, Rust stops feeling restrictive and starts feeling precise.