The Rust programming language has entered Tiobe's top 20 for the first time, but it is still five places behind rival Go.
There is growing interest in using Rust for systems programming to build large platforms, particularly at Microsoft, which uses it for Windows and Azure with the goal of eliminating memory errors in code written in C and C++. Amazon Web Services also uses Rust for performance-sensitive components in Lambda, EC2, and S3.
Rust has seen its ranking rise significantly on Tiobe, from 38th last year to 20th today. Tiobe's index is based on searches for a language on major search engines, so it doesn't mean that more people are using Rust, but it does show that more developers are looking for information about the language.
Rust was voted the most favorite programming language by developers for the fifth year in a row in the 2020 Stack Overflow survey. This year, 86% of developers said they would like to use Rust, but only 5% are already using it.
On the other hand, it could be used more widely thanks to Microsoft's public preview of the Rust library for Windows Runtime (WinRT), which makes it easier for developers to write Windows, cross-platform apps and drivers in Rust.
Paul Jansen, CEO of software firm Tiobe, said Rust's rise is due to it being a systems programming language that "gets the job done.".
However, Rust requires dedication to learning. Microsoft Azure developers were initially less productive in Rust than Go, but they ended up spending less time debugging and manually checking for errors.
The Rust project's 2020 developer survey found that users struggle to adopt the language due to its steep learning and because few companies use it. Google excluded Rust for its new Fuchsia OS because too few developers are familiar with the language.
Developers are also increasingly looking at Go-safe for systems programming, with the language used to build platforms at Google, Netflix, Salesforce, IBM and Twitter. It has jumped to 12th place on Tiobe from 15th a year ago.
A recent survey of over 16,000 developers found that Go is the most in-demand language. Rust and Go are tied for salaries of over $120,000 in the US, according to Stack Overflow's survey.
Also new to Tiobe's top 20 is Scratch, the visual programming language developed by the MIT Media Lab for teaching kids how to program. Scratch is a great option for beginners to learn programming on the Raspberry Pi. Scratch went from 26th to 18th on Tiobe's index, but its highest ranking was 14th in 2017.
The R programming language went from position 22 to 9, almost reaching the top ranking of 8 in 2018.
Curiously, Microsoft's TypeScript only ranks 44th in Tiobe's index. Developer analyst RedMonk, which bases its rankings on GitHub and Stack Overflow data, put TypeScript at 9th place in its latest ranking.
TypeScript adoption is driven by the sheer volume of existing JavaScript code out there. It's also extremely popular among developers, second only to Rust in Stack Overflow research for 2020 and just ahead of Python.
Tiobe's top 10 programming languages for June 2020 are C, Java, Python, C++, C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, PHP, R, and SQL.
The rankings roughly align with Stack Overflow's list of most commonly used languages, which were JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, Python, Java, Bash/Shell/PowerShell, C#, PHP, TypeScript, C++, C, and Go.
