The Rust Core Team announced today the establishment of the Rust Foundation and over one million dollars in annual pledges to support the language and community.
Late last year, Mozilla and the Rust Core Team announced their intention to create a new foundation to drive the Rust programming language and ecosystem growth. Ashley Williams – member of the Rust Core Team and Interim Managing Director for Rust Foundation – today announced the formal creation of the foundation through the new Rust Foundation Team blog.
The Rust Foundation is a new non-profit organization that aims to lead the Rust language and ecosystem, with an unparalleled focus on supporting the set of custodians who managing and developing the project.
AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla will be the foundation’s founding companies, and each – in addition to five directors from project leadership, two representing the Core Team, as well as the three project areas: Reliability, Quality, and Collaboration – will keep a chair on the foundation board. The first meeting of the new board will be held on Tuesday, February 9th.
While the board will help ensure the success of the language and the ecosystem, Rust’s model of community autonomy continues. Williams wrote in the news, “… Rust is much more than a programming and community language – Rust also represents a radical, new way of collaborating on open source projects.”
Rust counts over 100 team members as leaders in the design and maintenance of the project, shepherding nearly 6000 participants to the rust-lang / rust repo alone since the project was first published. Through the Rust Rust process, more than 1,000 people have made nearly 500 decisions that represent the most critical and strategic output and design decisions for the project.
While community management principles such as the “new philosophy” ensure that language conversations take place completely openly, Rust’s popularity among developers is driven by the promises of memory safety, a distance equal to C , and the effectiveness of a modern language that enables developers to simply write. faster actor code.
William Morgan – CEO of Buoyant, the company that supports the popular service mesh Linkerd – explained their decision to write the emergency service mesh sidebar in Rust on The InfoQ Podcast. “I think the latest kind of asynchronous program engineering is happening in Rust right now.” He went on to say that Rust allowed Buoyant to “basically put these things together about how fast the computer can execute them.”
Morgan’s comments are echoed by systems developers across the software industry. In the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Rust took the lead as the most popular programming language (an activity the language has accomplished for five years in a row). 86% of survey respondents use Rust today, saying they want to continue using it in the future. While the actual number of developers who actively responded to the survey writes in Rust is still low at around 5%, measures such as the TIOBE Index show that the language is very popular. worldwide from February 2021 (previously reaching a high of 20 in September 2020).
Concerns over the August 11 announcement by Mozilla, the original home of the Rust project, restructuring and releasing 250 people, including members of the Rust community, have raised concerns about the future of the language. and the recent decline in popularity.
Williams says with the creation of the board, the founding members represent “… a 2 year commitment to a one million dollar annual budget to develop services, programs, and events that will support the custodians of the Rust project in to build the best Rust possible, and we have only just begun. “
To learn more about Rust and the Rust Foundation visit foundation.rust-lang.org.