After working with Rust for a couple of years now, I was wondering how Rust was trending on Hacker News in comparison to C++ and Python.

As a proxy measure for programming language trends, I thought it might be informative to analyze the frequency of programming language mentions in the monthly “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” and “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?” postings on Hacker News for a few years. Let’s see the graphs.

Interesting. What can we take away?

• Demand and supply for Python is much higher than for Rust or C++. Also, Python is on a very different slope in both graphs. – Is that due to AI-everything?
• Demand declined for all languages and bottomed out sometime in mid-2023. – There have been rounds of layoffs across the tech sector. Naturally, the job postings would be fewer.
• The trend lines on the supply side look roughly anti-correlated to the demand side. – No surprise there. I just find it fascinating that the data pool on HN is large enough to show this anti-correlation.
• Rust and C++ are close to each other both on the supply and demand side, but according to the trend lines, there has been a tipping point in 2022 slightly favoring Rust over C++ in job postings. – This shouldn’t be surprising since there has been a push for memory-safe languages.

This was just a small experiment tapping into HN data to see how a few programming languages are trending. This question was more out of personal curiosity than anything else, since I enjoyed C++ for many years as a systems programming language for robotics, self-driving vehicles, sensors, computer vision, and medical devices. Python, on the other hand, has been my go-to language for machine learning and deep learning applications for several years. Today, when starting a new project, however, I usually start out in Rust, but may fall back to either Python or C++ depending on its nature.

Once you start looking at the data many more questions open up:

• What effect did COVID have? Hm, need to go back further than 2021.
• When did the major layoffs happen? Can you see that in this data? Needs more research.
• When was the White House Press Release advocating for Rust again? – February 2024. Do we see an uptick in job postings for Rust since then? – Now that you say it 😄