For the first time ever, the Rust language has cracked the top 10 in Tiobe’s index of programming language popularity.
With a 1.34% rating, Rust is ranked 10th in the Tiobe Programming Community index for July 2026, which was published July 5. “Rust’s growing popularity can largely be attributed to its strong focus on memory safety while still generating extremely fast code,” said Paul Jansen, CEO at software quality services provider Tiobe.
“[Rust] is widely regarded as a direct competitor to C and C++, both of which continue to struggle with the challenges of explicit memory management and are therefore often considered less safe,” Jansen said. “That said, the C and C++ communities are actively working on making their languages safer. Time will tell whether these efforts will pay off in time.”
The Tiobe index marks its 25th anniversary this month. Tiobe’s ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors pertinent to a language, calculated using popular websites such as Google, Bing, Amazon, and Wikipedia.
Tiobe’s top 10 programming languages for July 2026:
- Python, 18.94%
- C, 10.86%
- C++, 9.12%
- Java, 8.03%
- C#, 4.49%
- JavaScript, 2.72%
- Visual Basic, 2.48%
- SQL, 1.71%
- R, 1.69%
- Rust, 1.34%
Jansen said Tiobe will publish a programming language flowchart designed to help developers select the most suitable programming language for their specific use case. The flowchart will be published on the Tiobe website this week or next week.
The alternative Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index assesses language popularity by analyzing how often language tutorials are searched on in Google.
The Pypl top 10 programming langages for July 2026:
- Python, 47.49%
- Java, 11.44%
- C/C++, 9.68%
- R, 4.68%
- JavaScript, 3.97%
- Objective-C, 3.15%
- PHP, 2.29%
- C#, 2.06%
- Rust, 2.06%
- Swift, 1.98%