For the first time ever, the Rust language has cracked the top 10 in Tiobe’s index of programming language popularity.
With a 1.34% rating, Rust is ranked 10th in the Tiobe Programming Community index for July 2026, which was published July 5. “Rust’s growing popularity can largely be attributed to its strong focus on memory safety while still generating extremely fast code,” said Paul Jansen, CEO at software quality services provider Tiobe.
“[Rust] is widely regarded as a direct competitor to C and C++, both of which continue to struggle with the challenges of explicit memory management and are therefore often considered less safe,” Jansen said. “That said, the C and C++ communities are actively working on making their languages safer. Time will tell whether these efforts will pay off in time.”
