Fewer Rust Developers Target WebAssembly

Year-over-year, WebAssembly has become a less popular target for Rust developers to build applications, according to 2021 version of JetBrains' annual "Developer Ecosystem Survey."

Aug 26th, 2021 10:00am by Lawrence E Hecht

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Editor’s Note: The caption under the first graphic changed since the article was published. The adoption of Rust increased instead of staying constant in the Stack Overflow survey.

Year-over-year, WebAssembly has become a less popular target for Rust developers to build applications with, according to the 2021 version of JetBrains’ annual Developer Ecosystem Survey. Among the 6% of developers that used Rust in the past 12 months, 21% had targeted WebAssembly as a platform, which is a decline from 29% in 2020 and 36% in 2019.

Further research is needed, but it is likely the first generation of Rust of developers are determining when and if WebAssembly is the appropriate platform to target. Likewise, while WebAssembly developers are extremely fond of Rust, there is a lot of room to grow among developers that want to compile other languages.

These statistics do not diminish the excitement about WebAssembly among developers that target serverless, containers and cloud native environments in general. Only 24% of WebAssembly developers currently use the technology with a serverless use case as opposed to 73% for web development, according to a June 2021 survey. Yet, 87% of those serverless adopters think this is an area where the technology will have a high impact. In comparison, only 44% of respondents not using serverless see a big impact.

Actual adoption of Rust in this survey did not skyrocket in 2021. In contrast, the adoption rose among professional developers in the 2021 Stack Overflow Study.

Source: The State of WebAssembly 2021. The graphic’s legend was previously mislabeled. It was corrected on June 18, 2022.

Lawrence has generated actionable insights and reports about enterprise IT B2B markets and technology policy issues for almost 25 years. He regularly works with clients to develop and analyze studies about open source ecosystems. In addition to his consulting work,...