Why should you learn Rust?
Well, I may be a little biased seeing as I'm a Rust programmer myself and help people learn Rust.
However, it also means I have direct experience from literally hundreds of hours using the language. So in this guide I'm going to break down the top 5 reasons why I think you should learn Rust in 2026.
Let's get into it
Reason #1. Rust puts Developers first
So what do I mean by that?
Well, Rust was designed with a forward thinking user experience.
If you've been in tech for a while, you'll know that software complexity gradually increases over time. More features are demanded in a shorter amount of time, and as standards go up, tolerance for bugs diminishes. New programming languages and libraries emerge and sometimes make marginal improvements, but these mostly just maintain the status quo.
Rust puts developers first by providing features that make software development smooth and reliable. This includes maintenance, which is a large part of a project's lifecycle.
Don't just take my word for it though...
Rust is the most 'loved' language by devs
According to StackOverFlows independent surveys of thousands of developers, Rust is the most liked programming language of last year with 72% of the votes!
Not bad right?
The 2026 version of the report isn't live yet, but I'm guessing it'll win again - simply because Rust has won that top spot every year for at least 4 years now!
But why do devs love it so much?
Well, let's break it down...
Rust has fantastic Ecosystem & Tooling
The Rust ecosystem is what really drives the Rust development experience. There are over 200,000 crates available, all complete with auto-generated documentation. (A "crate" is a Rust code library).
These crates can then be accessed using the cargo tool, which comes as part of the Rust toolchain. This is a universal build tool that manages code dependencies, generates documentation, tests and lints your code, runs benchmarks, and compiles your program.
Handy right?
Rust is also extensible, so if you need new functionality you can write an extension, such as:
Like I say, it super useful because reliable code is more than just code that runs properly. It has to be open for refactoring, easy to read by other developers (including your future self!), and be consistent.
To make this a reality, Rust also comes with additional tools such as clippy, rustfmt, and rustdoc.
Linting with Clippy
Clippy is the Rust code linter that turns the compiler assistance up to 11. It can catch performance-related problems, misuse of specific functionality, and enforce Rust coding conventions.
It goes almost too far (or not far enough?) by actually re-writing your code as part of its output, so you can just copy it to your project. Clippy is also fully configurable, so you can enable and disable lints on a case-by-case basis, directly in your code, by applying specific rules at the function level.
For example
You can change lint severity as well. So if want a specific lint to always fail your CI pipeline? Just change it from warn to deny and now you'll always be aware when an issue crops up.
Rust allows for easy code formatting with rustfmt
The value of consistent code cannot be understated. Rust has a specific coding style that can be automated across an entire codebase using the rustfmt tool. This tool has widespread IDE integration, so it's usually automatically enabled when configuring your IDE for Rust.
This makes it easy to jump into an existing codebase and focus on the problem, instead of worrying about following specific style rules. Similar to clippy, the rustfmt tool can be disabled at the function level in cases where you need fine-grained control over how your code looks.
Rust allows for consistent Documentation with rustdoc
Finally, we have rustdoc. This tool generates documentation for your project and outputs a browsable web page that allows you to search for function names, return values, and data types.
Just like rustfmt, the rustdoc tool also has widespread usage across the Rust ecosystem, making it easy to get information on a project.
For example
Documentation in Rust is more than just a few HOW-TO lines. It has full Markdown support, and the compiler will actually test example code snippets that are present in your documentation.
This ensures that developers who are first using your project will have up-to-date and accurate examples to build upon. Documentation for every published Rust crate is available online at docs.rs.
Rust has a vibrant community
The Rust community is very welcoming to all programmers and has a strict Code of conduct which ensures that Rust communities are friendly and comfortable.
You will always feel at home in the Rust Discord channel and on the developer forums. (Just like you will in the Rust channel on our Private Discord):
If you are new to Rust and want to contribute to Rust projects, many repositories use the `good first issue` or `easy` tags on their issues, so you can jump right into the code.
Community resources are also available in the form of the Official Rust Book, and Rust by Example], which walks you through the language using, you guessed it, lots of example code!
You'll also find a heap of great free resources out there, such as the other Rust guides on this blog, as well as my Rust cheatsheet:
And that's just the tip of the iceberg!
Reason #2. Rust has dependable code
Null pointer errors? Nah
Runtime problems cropping up 6 months later? Nope
Waking up at 2AM for an on-call emergency hotfix? Not with Rust!
Reliability is the bread-and-butter of Rust programs and is the reason why Rust is the language of the future. Let's take a look at how Rust is able to provide extreme reliability.
The Rust compiler is insanely helpful
Compilers aren't something that normally comes to mind when working on a project. It's just the thing that builds your program and sometimes emits cryptic error messages for pasting into a Google search.
Rust is different though...
You see, the Rust compiler is your personal code assistant because it checks your work, provides detailed help messages, re-writes your erroneous code with code it thinks might work properly, and once it's satisfied, produces output that runs correctly, efficiently, and reliably.
Talk about useful!
For example
Here are a few examples of the fantastic help provided by the compiler:
Not satisfied with these help messages? Rust also has the explain command which provides an example of broken code, explains why it's broken, and even provides the steps on how to fix it!
(This was all before AI tools by the way).
This is great when running into new problems where you aren't able to figure out the issue from just the brief error messages shown in the screenshots.
Rust has long-term stability
The Rust compiler ships a new version every six weeks. Not only that, but around every three years, a special version called an edition is shipped.
Editions are Rust's way of introducing large, potentially breaking changes, without impacting the Rust ecosystem. Once an edition ships, all new Rust projects you create will default to the new edition, and each edition is guaranteed to build & run as long as Rust exists.
With editions, that old code you wrote 6 years ago will still build and run using the newest Rust compiler, even if there have been breaking changes during that time period. You can think of editions as a "front-end" layer to the Rust compiler: mostly syntactic updates which eventually get translated into the "back-end" compiler code.
This means your old code can potentially receive performance improvements just by rebuilding it with the newest version of the compiler!
Crater
Something that doesn't get much attention, but plays a critical role in Rust's stability (and its ability to be released every 6 weeks), is a tool called crater.
Crater is a tool that is run before new Rust versions are released that builds the entire crates.io registry, runs the test suites for all the discovered codebases, and generates a report which allows the Rust team to determine if any upcoming changes will break part of the ecosystem.
Thanks to Crater, the compiler has been tested against tens of thousands of codebases before you even have the chance to get the newest version. This means you can try out all the hot new language features every 6 weeks without worrying about Rust breaking your project and/or eating your code!
Rust allows you to handle branches with pattern matching
No, I'm not talking about your awesome git feature branch. I mean whether code at line 80 gets executed or code at line 83 gets executed.
It's usually a chore to write enough test cases to cover all possible code branches. Rust alleviates this by implementing exhaustive pattern matching, which checks to make sure your code has an execution path for specific types of input.
This is enabled using the match keyword, which requires you to provide behavior for every possible value of a data type.
For example
// Type annotation not needed; it will be inferred by the compiler.
let my_value = true;
// Use `match` to check each possible boolean value.
match my_value {
true => println!("value is true"),
false => println!("value is false"),
}With match , errors that would normally only be caught at runtime in other languages, become compile-time errors in Rust.
For example
Here's the same code as above, but without the false branch:
let my_value = true;
match my_value {
true => println!("value is true"),
}
Pattern matching seems like a small feature when you consider Rust as a whole, but this simple keyword enables your application to run extremely reliably since there will always be some code to execute, regardless of the input data.
This provides confidence in the stability of your code and lets you focus on domain solutions instead of worrying about language gotchas.
Rust allows you to express Data with Enumerations
Pattern matching isn't just limited to simple things like a boolean. It can be applied to data structures you create yourself.
For example
Imagine a hotel booking system for a large hotel chain.
Booking a room can become complicated, but Rust provides enumerations to express this in a concise way, which lets you focus on the problem at hand:
/// Possible outcomes of booking a room.
enum Booking {
Booked(ConfirmationNumber),
Unavailable,
}
/// A function to book a room at a hotel.
fn book(hotel: &Hotel, room: &Room) -> Booking {
// ...
}Data can be encapsulated within enumerations, so we are able to express multiple different outcomes along with any data associated with that outcome.
Considering that the compiler will emit errors if we fail to check for a possible outcome, we can modify our existing enumeration as such:
enum Booking {
Booked(ConfirmationNumber),
+ NoVacancies,
Unavailable,
}Compiling the program will now provide a list of all code utilizing hotel bookings which needs to be updated to account for the new outcome. This saves time, reduces bugs, and ensures your application will run as expected whenever changes are made.
Now imagine if we apply this to an entire codebase. Well then you get extremely reliable programs that are very easy to change.
Want to refactor some code?
No problem! Just make some changes, follow compiler errors until the program builds, then re-run your test suite. After refactoring, the odds of your test suite not passing are extremely low.
Rust even helps when things go wrong!
That being said, there is always the possibility of failure. However, Rust takes a different approach than many programming languages.
There are no exceptions in Rust, because Rust likes things to be obvious, and exceptions being thrown from anywhere in the code is definitely non-obvious.
Instead, Rust has the Result data enumeration. This means that Result encapsulates either a successful value, or an error value.
Why care?
Simply because reading a function signature and seeing a Result as the return value is concise, so it makes it clear that the function might fail:
/// Possible errors when making a connection.
enum ConnectionError {
InvalidPassword,
NoResponse,
Timeout,
}
/// Make a new connection, but it might fail with a `ConnectionError`.
fn connect(ip: Ipv4Addr) -> Result<Connection, ConnectionError> {
// ...
}This is super efficient, self-documenting (there's no hidden case where an exception gets thrown), and allows errors to be handled using all the familiar functionality that is available for working with any other kind of data.
Combining match with this function enables us to easily access both success and error values:
let address = Ipv4Addr::new(127, 0, 0, 1);
match connect(address) {
// Successful case
Ok(connection) => /* alright, we are connected! */,
// Error case. Let's match on the error and find out what happened.
Err(e) => match e {
ConnectionError::InvalidPassword => /* whoops! */,
ConnectionError::NoResponse => /* wrong address maybe? */,
ConnectionError::Timeout => /* might be a busy server */,
},
}Of course, this level of detail is only useful sometimes. Remember that Rust puts you first, so if you only want a successful value, you can get it using the question mark operator:
let connection = connect(Ipv4Addr::new(127, 0, 0, 1))?;
// ...
// send some data across the connection, etc
}Rust allows us to fix the Billion dollar mistake
Null in programming is simply the absence of a value; usually because something that has not yet been initialized.
While this seems simple enough, programming in a language that allows nullable types, (also known as the billion dollar mistake by its inventor), is a lot like buying a used car.
Hopefully the car runs, but you can never be sure without inspecting it fully. It can even run just fine during a test drive, but there may be something missing that eventually leads to problems later.
For example
Let's see this in action with my second favorite language, Python:
class Element(object):
def log(self):
print("logged!")
def take_action(elements):
for el in elements:
el.log()
# Runtime Error: None is not iterable
take_action(None)
# Runtime Error: list of None is iterable, but None has no log method
take_action([None])
# Runtime Error: first element works, but second element causes a crash
take_action([Element(), None])
# Runtime Error: numbers are not iterable
take_action(3)
# Runtime Error: strings are iterable, but characters have no log method
take_action("hello")
# Works: empty list is iterable, but the loop body never runs
take_action([])Now, if we run this Python code, we will get runtime errors for all but the last take_action function call.
Sure this is a simple example but as you can see, in even a small to medium-sized codebase, it is not always apparent if you are working with null data returned from a function, instead of the data that you actually want.
This means that the code must be manually traced in order to determine if a null might be returned and this takes time and is prone to mistakes. The end result is null pointer exception errors occurring periodically when uncommon data passes through your program, which leads to the persistent need for bug fixes.
Now compare that to the same program written in Rust:
struct Element;
// Implement some functionality for Element.
impl Element {
fn log(&self) {
println!("logged!");
}
}
// Vec is short for vector, which is just a dynamic array/list.
fn take_action(elements: Vec<Element>) {
for el in elements {
el.log();
}
}
fn main() {
// Compiler Error: None is not a vector
take_action(None);
// Compiler Error: need a vector of `Element`
take_action(vec![None]);
// Compiler Error: number is not a vector
take_action(3);
// Compiler Error: string is not a vector
take_action("hello");
// Compiler Error: cannot mix multiple types in a vector
take_action(vec![Element, None]);
// Works: vector is the type we need
take_action(vec![]);
}In contrast to the Python code, we won't even be able to compile this Rust code, let alone run it, because we would get 5 compiler errors that look something like this:
This is the power of having a robust type system that banishes null. Simply because errors that typically would occur at runtime now occur whenever you compile your program.
This saves a huge amount of developer time since the bugs that were present in the Python program are now hard errors in Rust. Also, when you consider that maintenance is nearly 70% of a project's total cost, moving these errors to compile time has large economic benefits over the life of a project!
Rust allows you to choose your level of detail
match is great, but not all situations require checking every possible outcome.
The cool thing about Rust is if you don't need to check every outcome, you don't have to. You can check only a few specific cases, or even just check if something worked or not.
For example
let connection = connect(Ipv4Addr::new(127, 0, 0, 1));
if connection.is_ok() {
// Alright, we are connected!
} else {
// Something went wrong, let's report a generic error.
}This applies to writing functions as well.
For example
Sometimes it isn't necessary to be super-specific about what data you are working with. When this is the case, you can go dynamic and forget about the details:
// We are using a dynamic error, which lets us return any kind of error.
fn call_api(conn: &Connection) -> Result<ApiData, Box<dyn Error>> {
// ...
}The compiler is still able to keep a close eye on your code when working with dynamic data, so if you make a mistake, Rust is there to help you out, just as if you had defined all of the details for a specific data type.
Reason #3. Rust works with WebAssembly
Rust has first-class WebAssembly support and is one of the most widely used languages for targeting Wasm in production. This is because Rust has no garbage collector and gives you precise control over memory, meaning that it maps extremely well to WebAssembly’s execution model and delivers near-native performance.
Not only that, but Rust’s Wasm tooling integrates cleanly with modern web development workflows, making it easy to ship performance-critical code to the browser or edge.
While Rust isn’t intended to replace JavaScript for UI work, it has become a go-to choice for compute-heavy, security-sensitive WebAssembly applications, thanks in part to the fact that Rust can run both on the backend (natively) and frontend (via Wasm).
Reason #4. Rust has fantastic industry support
I mentioned all the community support earlier, but Rust also has fantastic industry support, so the future of Rust is bright.
Members include:
This is thanks in part to the Rust Foundation which manages the project and ensures that core contributors are fully supported in order to keep the Rust project active and in constant development.
Reason #5. Rust has a proven track record
Rust has already been integrated into large projects and is either running in production or being prepped for production, right now.
For example:
In the past, the Linux project has only ever accepted C code, but it supports Rust Linux kernel drivers (which is a big deal)
Cloudflare transitioned their application firewall to Rust, which is responsible for protecting millions of websites.
The JavaScript package manager (NPM) which has around billions of downloads per day, uses Rust for their registry operations
Dropbox rewrote their sync engine in Rust to deal with their scaling problems
Discord augmented their codebase with Rust for faster Member List processing
Google uses Rust for new Android components, so they can increase the security of billions of devices
There are many more cases of smaller companies using Rust in production, and the list is only growing.
What are you waiting for? Go learn Rust today!
So as you can see, there are so many reasons and benefits to learn Rust.
If you want to start today, check out my complete Rust course below:
You can learn how to code and build your own real-world applications using Rust so that you can get hired this year. No previous programming or Rust experience needed.
The course is updated multiple times per year so it's always up to date.
You'll also get access to our private Discord community, where you can chat with me, other students, and other working tech professionals that use Rust daily for their careers.
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