We have three major audiences:

* "systems programmers", aka the C and C++ folk

* "functional programmers", largely Haskell folk

* "scripting programmers", mostly Ruby/Python/JavaScript folk

Each has gotten something out of Rust, and also brought some things to Rust.

You're missing the group which Java, C#, Swift, D and Go co-inhabit. Somewhere between "systems" and "scripting".

I did say "major" for a reason :)

I don't personally hear from many self-identified Java/C# people who are coming to Rust. Maybe they exist and I don't hear from them, or they don't describe themselves as such.

There are some Go developers, but it seems the languages attract very different types of people, so there aren't many. There are some people who do love both.

There are only a few people from D (of which technically if you squint I'm sort of one, incidentally.)

> I think most of these programmers, and their project are not the target of Rust? If you're writing Java/C# or higher level languages, you already made the choice to sacrifice some computing efficiency for programming efficiency.

Or you just don't know any better, as was the case for me.

There are many benefits to Rust that are not related to runtime efficiency.

I originally picked up Rust because I couldn't make audio processing in JS fast enough.

I stayed because I found Rust to be a language that not only doesn't get in your way, but also helps you out of some situations.

I mean, I had the compiler say to me "Perhaps you could [...]". Perhaps. And nine out ten times it was a good suggestion.

I don't know the demographics/targets, but I come to rust from ruby. So does Steve Kabnick, the author of the Rust book.

Cool!

What kind of projects do you work on, and what made you switch?

Well, I have not "switched". For now I am just learning (at a very slow pace).

My current job is not in ruby any more, now I do Lua - I'm a core dev at Kong - https://konghq.com/ . It's much lower-level than ruby, but still not as low as you can go with rust.