As someone who just took a job writing rust recently, I have to disagree with your take on the career prospects. I specifically looked to switch to Rust in my last job search, and I had plenty of companies to apply to. The market also is only getting bigger, with all of the FAANG(M) companies now employing a significant number of rust engineers.

I just did a search on Dice for jobs.

Java: 12,879 Golang: 4,339 COBOL: 321 Haskell: 18 Rust: 2

The Rust jobs also appeared to be blockchain related, so I wouldn’t count on that being a place that could get you to retirement. I would expect Rust is a requirement so a marketer add a bullet point in his or her slide deck.

Yeah, there are fewer rust jobs in general because it’s a newer language, and blockchain is one of the areas it gained its earliest traction. Of the companies I applied to when I was looking for a rust job, though, only one out of five did anything related to blockchain.

I don’t know what Dice is, but Indeed, stack overflow, angel list, and google’s job aggregator all had quite a few rust jobs when I was looking. I also kept a spreadsheet of companies I had heard about who were using and hiring for rust over the course of the last couple of years at my previous job. In addition to FAANG and Microsoft, there were quite a few smaller shops like 1Password and Signal.

And the job I wound up taking has nothing to do with blockchain, fwiw

That's really exciting to hear. I'm struggling with a cs degree (especially the mathier bits) at a mediocre school, and I think the sort of jobs looking for Rust are looking for a more traditional background. Still, I hope I'll get a job in Rust someday.

I know this is only anecdata, but I graduated from a state school (absolutely nothing fancy) with a biochemistry degree and switched to a programming job a couple of years later. I worked in Perl, Python, and JavaScript mostly for years, while picking up whatever interested me on the side, which included Rust.

The company I joined didn’t expect people to already be rust programmers, and I think about half of our engineers are from non-CS backgrounds. Experience counts for way way more than your degree once you’re a few years into the field.

So, keep an eye out! There’s plenty of stuff out there for whatever interests you, and most programming (even in a language like rust) is not super heavy on meatier CS concepts most of the time.

How do you write so much as a student?

Procrastinating :) It's an average of around 15 loc/day, and I'm not great at going to sleep on time.