Since its production release 1.0, Rust has enjoyed quite a steady uptake. This is manifest if you view a Google Trends survey:

In the well-known TIOBE Index (see https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index//), it reached 50th place in September 2015 and is now ranked in 37th position.

In the RedMonk ranking of programming languages (see http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2017/06/08/language-rankings-6-17/), it is ready to join the popularity of Lua, CoffeeScript, and Go.

Also, for two consecutive years, Rust was the most loved programing language on Stack Overflow (see https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted).

As a hallmark of its success, today, more than 50 companies are using Rust in production, see https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html, amongst which are HoneyPot, Tilde, Chef, npm, Canonical, Coursera, and Dropbox.

It is clear from the previous sections that Rust can be used in projects that would normally use C or C++. Indeed, many regard Rust as a successor to, or a replacement for, C/C++. Although Rust is designed to be a systems language, due to its richness of constructs, it has a broad range of possible applications, making it an ideal candidate for applications that fall into one or all of the following categories:

• Client applications, like browsers
• Low-latency, high-performance systems, like device drivers, games and signal processing
• Highly distributed and concurrent systems, like server applications and microservices
• Real-time and critical systems, like operating systems or kernels
• Embedded systems (requiring a very minimal runtime footprint) or resource-constrained environments, like Raspberry Pi and Arduino, or robotics
• Tools or services that can't support the long warmup delays common in just-in-time (JIT) compiler systems and need instantaneous startup
• Web frameworks
• Large-scale, high-performance, resource intensive, and complex software systems

Rust is especially suitable when code quality is important, that is, for the following:

• Modestly-sized or larger development teams
• Code for long-running production use
• Code with a longer lifetime that requires regular maintenance and refactoring
• Code for which you would normally write a lot of unit tests to safeguard