Webassembly Developers Choose Rust Over Python says Report

Published on:

28 Jun 2022, 8:00 am

Even though Python scaled up a few slots in the rankings, Rust ruling the minds of the developer community

Rust turned out to be the most popular language among web assembly developers. A survey 'The State of WebAssembly 2022' was released by a software consulting firm Scott Logic. Among the 299 application developers interviewed, 45% favored Rust for WASM development. It is not the first time Rust has topped the charts; it has been winning the top position ever since 2016. On the other hand, equally popular languages like Blazor and Python have scaled up the survey ranks. When we look at the Toibe index which calculates the ranking based on ranking extracted through TIOBE Software, Python occupies the top position whereas Rust is in the 27^th position. Clearly, Rust has got its popularity by virtue of human choice which makes it superior to Python. There is more to this story about why Rust is constantly winning over usage and desirability departments.

Why is Rust unique?

Rust, initially created as an alternative to C++ language, is slowly gaining its place as an indispensable programming language for web app development. There are indeed other languages like Python, C++, and Java available but Rust scores in many respects over these languages. Precisely, it addresses the shortcomings of these languages without giving room for too many downsides. The close relationship between Rust and WebAssembly, with most Wasm runtimes written in Rust, has also got a mention in the report. Big ticket companies in the software industry like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Cloudfare have long given up on old languages, for Rust has better data security features. Rust though comes from a family of dynamically typed languages, its static types and heavy compile-time give it an advantage over Python. Dropbox which wrote some parts of its file synchronization code in Python initially, had to rewrite it in Rust because it had encountered enormous debugging issues in Python whereas Coursera, an online education platform had to resort to Rust when it encountered security glitches with C. These examples are proof enough to dig deep into why Rust would overtake the very beloved Python language.

Better performance:

Rust can be compiled directly into machine code, and therefore there is literally no virtual machine or interpreter located between the code and computer. A code interpreter translates the source code into machine language, a complex process that makes interpreted programming languages like Python run slower. Also with Rust, it is possible to have better thread and memory management. Because Rust lacks garbage collection, the compiler clears its individual variable as and when the need arises preventing the invalid memory reference leaks.

Superior memory management:

Modern programming languages like Python are good at memory management. But Rust despite not having garbage collection, fares far better because it gives a lot of low-level memory control. While executing a program it creates a stack to keep track of everything happening in the program thus ensuring the memory is freed up when a variable is out of the scope of the code.

Debugging:

Facebook which initially wrote its backend source code in Python had to rewrite it in Rust because of its safety features. As per the official statement by Facebook they had to abandon Python and choose Rust because of the huge debugging costs which come with Python. Rusts can detect large classes of serious bugs at compile time itself which can save you a big time when compared to debugging at production time.

Parallel computing capabilities:

With Rust, it is possible for safe parallel computing improving the performance of the code to a great extent. There is not one but several ways parallelism can be introduced into Rust's programming while Python is limited in this aspect. Python lets the programmer use only a single thread at one time to maintain the performance of the thread, which implies using multiple cores for intensive programming is not possible.

Conclusion:

Currently, the Rust community is not as big and libraries are not as vast as Python. It doesn't mean Rust is lagging behind Python. The number of developers and Rust enthusiasts joining the community is only proof of how functional the language is growing to be every other day. Rust already has thousands of community-developed libraries, frameworks, and development tools to its credit, and what is the excuse you make to ignore its active subreddit section?