Don't Waste Your Life on Rust, Deceived by Zealots (Based on TIOBE Data & a GPU Case Study)

In every online community and blog, you’ll find people proclaiming, “Rust is the future.” I call them “Rust zealots.” I’m writing this in the hope that you don’t waste your precious time and career, deceived by their sweet talk. This argument is now based on objective data and concrete case studies.

Of course, let’s be clear: Rust is a technically brilliant language. However, a developer’s career is built on the reality of the “market,” not on a technical utopia. Let’s examine the cold, hard reality proven by numbers—a reality the zealots will never tell you about.

1. The Cold, Hard Reality Told by Numbers (The TIOBE Index)

Let’s look at objective indicators, not feelings. According to the July 2025 TIOBE Index, Rust’s rank is 18th.

To put that into perspective, this is lower than languages once considered “old,” like Visual Basic (8th), Ada (9th), Delphi (10th), and even Fortran (12th). This is a far cry from its glamorous title as the “systems language of a new era.”

What’s more shocking is the fact that it has fallen 5 spots from its 13th place ranking last year. How can we explain the declining popularity of a language hailed as “the future”? TIOBE’s own report commented on this, saying:

“Where are Rust, Kotlin, Dart, and Julia? Apparently, established languages are hot.”

The data doesn’t lie. Market demand for Rust engineers is not exploding; it is stagnating or even shrinking. This is the reality you will face.

2. Case Study: The Illusion of ‘Rust for All GPUs’

A prime example of how Rust’s hype collides with reality is the “GPU integration” project. While the recent attempt to “conquer all GPUs with a single Rust codebase” was a fascinating endeavor, a deeper look reveals Rust’s fundamental limitations.

The Expensive Tax of Abstraction

The project’s architecture is a complex ‘Rube Goldberg machine’: Rust Code → SPIR-V → Naga Translation → HLSL/MSL → GPU Driver. Every layer of abstraction demands a heavy tax in the form of performance degradation and loss of control. If C++/CUDA is a straight highway to the hardware, this approach is like taking a series of unpaved back roads—unpredictable and inevitably slower.

‘One-Size-Fits-All’ Can Never Be ‘The Best’

The “write once, run anywhere” slogan inevitably falls into the ‘least common denominator’ trap. To achieve universality, you must abandon the core advantages of specific hardware, like NVIDIA’s Tensor Cores or Apple’s Unified Memory. This results in code that runs “just okay” everywhere but achieves peak performance nowhere.

The Insurmountable Wall of the Ecosystem

NVIDIA’s CUDA is not just a language; it’s a massive ecosystem of libraries like cuDNN and TensorRT, and powerful tools like NSight. It’s impossible for Rust to replicate all of this in the short term. This is a challenge not only in the GPU space but in other specialized fields as well.

3. The Price of ‘Safety’: A Punishing Blow to Productivity

This problem isn’t limited to specialized fields like GPUs. Rust’s celebrated ‘memory safety’ doesn’t come for free. The price is the developer’s time and mental energy—in other words, productivity. The infamous ownership and borrow checker can force you to wrestle with the compiler for hours over a simple piece of logic.

Of course, this is worthwhile for projects where a single byte error is catastrophic, like an OS kernel. But do the 99% of general-purpose projects really require this level of rigor? This punishing learning curve and development experience is a key reason why Rust remains stuck at the 18th position on the TIOBE index.

4. The Reality of Specialization and Real-World Deployment

The market wants “the specialized best,” not a “jack-of-all-trades.” This is why TIOBE’s own CEO, in the report, picked Ada (9th)—not Rust—as a future survivor. The reason is clear:

“With the ever-stronger demands on security, Ada is
 as a system programming language in the safety-critical domain, likely the best survivor.”

This demonstrates that the world of programming is not converging on a single universal tool.

  • If you need the best performance, you use C++/C (TIOBE #2, #3).
  • If you need the best productivity (AI/Web), you use Python/Java (TIOBE #1, #4).
  • If you need the highest level of safety, you consider Ada (TIOBE #9).

Furthermore, many Rust-based projects still have dependencies on nightly versions or suffer from an immature debugging experience, posing serious risks for real-world, commercial deployment.

Conclusion: Make Your Decision Based on Data

Rust can be a powerful weapon for experts in a few niche fields (e.g., systems programming, blockchain).

However, for most developers, especially juniors just starting their careers, “betting your life” on Rust is a very risky gamble, as the TIOBE data shows.

Beware the religious-like faith of the Rust zealots. They inflate the technical merits while ignoring the reality proven by numbers. Please, don’t be swayed by the hype. Look at the data, and soberly judge what is truly necessary for your career and your projects.