🦀 The Rise and Fall of Rust: What Went Wrong With the Most Loved Language?

For years, Rust was the language everyone in tech circles couldn’t stop talking about. It promised the impossible:

• 🔐 Memory safety without a garbage collector
• ⚡ C-like performance
• 💬 Developer-friendly error messages
• 🧰 A killer toolchain with cargo

It seemed Rust had cracked the systems programming nut for good. And yet... here we are in 2025, watching the language lose steam in both industry adoption and community hype.

Let’s rewind and unpack Rust’s fascinating journey—how it rose to fame, why developers swore by it, and what ultimately led to its slowdown.

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🚀 The Meteoric Rise

✅ 1. Safety without the Runtime Overhead

Rust’s ownership and borrowing system was a breakthrough. It brought a compile-time solution to memory issues that plague C/C++—no more segfaults, no dangling pointers, no data races. For security-focused domains like OS kernels and embedded systems, Rust was a game-changer.

✅ 2. Backed by Mozilla & Powered by Community

Initially incubated by Mozilla, Rust wasn’t just a pet project—it had strong institutional backing. Then came the community. The documentation? Beautiful. Compiler errors? Genuinely helpful. The package manager (cargo)? A dream.

✅ 3. Loved by Devs, Courted by Giants

From 2016–2022, Rust topped Stack Overflow’s “Most Loved Language” charts year after year. Microsoft started experimenting with it in the Windows kernel. AWS used it in services like Firecracker. Even the Linux kernel community flirted with Rust.

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⚠️ The Slowdown: Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts?

So... what happened?

❌ 1. The Learning Curve is Brutal

Let’s be real: lifetimes, borrowing rules, complex generics—they’re a headache. Many devs bounced off Rust not because it was bad, but because it was too smart for its own good. The compiler holds your hand, but only after slapping it first.

❌ 2. Tooling vs Ecosystem

Rust has amazing tools but still lacks full maturity in areas like GUI, mobile dev, and data science. Async support took years to stabilize. Meanwhile, Python and Go kept iterating and scaling in developer productivity.

❌ 3. Corporate Realities

Yes, Rust was exciting. But rewriting codebases and retraining engineers is expensive. Enterprise adoption slowed as companies crunched the ROI numbers. Rust looked great on paper but was hard to justify at scale.

❌ 4. The Innovation Race Got Crowded

New challengers emerged—Zig, Carbon, Mojo, even memory-safe C++ subsets. They learned from Rust’s complexity and offered “just enough safety” without the cognitive load.

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🧠 So, Did Rust Fail?

Not really. It succeeded in changing the conversation. Rust:

• Made safety mainstream in system languages
• Pushed compiler design forward
• Raised expectations for developer UX in low-level tools

Rust inspired a generation of safer, smarter programming. But it also showed us that great tech isn’t always enough. Usability, ecosystem support, and organizational inertia matter—a lot.

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🎯 Final Take

Rust isn’t going away. It’s still loved, still in use, and still evolving. But its rise was meteoric—and its stall-out is a reality check. Not all technically superior tools win the war of adoption.

As devs, we can appreciate Rust for what it taught us:

Writing safe, fast code is possible. But building a universally adopted language? That’s the real challenge.

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🗣️ Over to you:

Have you used Rust? Still love it? Moved on? Drop your thoughts in the comments—curious to hear where the community stands.

Comments

[mario ANTUNES]

I wanted to share my perspective as a developer who loves Rust but has encountered some hurdles—especially when it comes to GUI development. The ecosystem for building desktop GUIs in Rust isn’t as mature as it is in other languages. I recently used Slint for my latest project. While it shows promise, there are still rough edges—both within Slint itself and in its integration with Rust. The documentation and examples are improving, but they’re not always sufficient for more complex scenarios.

In the beginning, I found Rust’s package manager (Cargo) a bit overwhelming. It almost feels like Cargo wants you to do things its way or not at all—especially when it comes to project structure and build conventions. At first, it nearly drove me crazy! But once I learned the concepts and embraced the “Rust way,” it all clicked, and now it feels intuitive—even empowering.

Despite these frustrations, I genuinely love working with Rust:

• Its strictness pays off in safety, especially for backend and systems programming.
• Once the initial hurdles are overcome, development becomes enjoyable and productive.

I hope the Rust community continues to improve GUI tooling and lowers the learning curve so that even more developers can fall in love with the language—not just for APIs or CLI tools, but for building beautiful apps as well.

Btw excellent Post.