I wrote a reply to a sibling comment here [0], but wanted to reemphasize that Rust and Swift are far from popular. I think it bears repeating because the gap between a Rust/Swift and Go is notable, but the gap between a Rust/Swift and Java is a chasm. I would guess this isn't the intuition of an HNer (it wasn't mine until I dug in for this discussion haha)

The median number of users across all programming languages is zero. Millions of people around the world use Rust and Swift, so it seems like a stretch to say they're far from popular. If Rust isn't a popular language compared to Java, we might just as well say Java is not a popular language compared to Excel.

I don't think millions of people use either Rust or Swift.

Millions of people don't use Go either.

You got me

According to SlashData "size of programming language communities, Q1 2025":

   28.0M JS+TS
   ...
   5.6M Swift
   5.1M Rust
   5.0M Go

They have measured Rust growing faster than Go over the years, with the overtake finally happening in Q1 this year.

There aren't a lot of reports presenting absolute numbers and not biased toward a handful of platforms or ecosystems. If you know of other good free ones, feel free to share.

https://research.slashdata.co/reports/6814fddffed4a97023eab0...

This is pretty intriguing but it wants me to make an account? Can I view it w/o doing that?

EDIT: also I gotta say these numbers seem kinda high. It's hard for me to imagine there's ~28m JS programmers worldwide; that's 1/286 people in the entire world, and the ratio gets less believable as you shrink down the number of people who might have any access at all to a computer/internet/etc. Unless this definition is super broad, I'm quite skeptical.

Kotlin as well, although I think this is mostly because of Android?