Yesterday I learned about the Unicode Consortium’s “Adopt a character” program.

This program allow anyone to sponsor/adopt a character, and the Consortium uses this money to drive the inclusion of ever more languages/scripts into the Unicode standard, thus furthering their goal of global inclusivity for all languages and cultures into the digital world.

Since rust is a big on inclusiveness, a big user of Unicode, and brings proper unicode support into the deepest depths of systems programming (by including it in libcore), I thought I’d ask around if we, as rust community, would like to spread the love, support unicode, and adopt the emoji, U+1F980

Unicode allows anyone to adopt any character;

for $100 one gets a non-exclusive “bronze level” sponsorship

for $1.000 one receives a “silver level” sponsorship, limited to at most 5 silver sponsors per character

for $5.000 one lucky person/group becomes the exclusive gold level sponsor.

(higher levels do not prevent the lower levels from being claimed)

If there is any interest in this, I could open a gofundme, kickstarter or similar campaign, to collect funding.

I’d suggest that the tag-line that would appear on the list of adopted characters should be “Ferris the friendly Rustacean - rust-lang.org”

We would be in good company, such as “ ” sponsored by our very own forum-provider, discourse.org, or “father of the internet” Vint G. Serf, who sponsored “ ”

P.S. If you’d like to know how close to Ferris this emoji is rendered on different systems, emojipedia has us covered

P.P.S. Of course, we could also adopt other characters, such as the lifetime ' (apostrophe), or the ⛭ (U+26ED, Gear Without Hub), if that sounds like more fun

Update: polls

Since there seems to be a pretty lively discussion, here’s a structured way for everybode to give their opinion (Not meant to discourage posting, just to automate the score-keeping). Please do explain your reasoning, and feel free to suggest alternatives!

Which character do you think the community should adopt?

adopt …

- U+1F980 / Crab emoji / Ferris

- U+1F980 / Crab emoji / Ferris ’ - U+0027 APOSTROPHE / lifetime tickmark

⛭ - U+26ED GEAR WITHOUT HUB

- U+2699 / GEAR (with hub)

- U+2699 / GEAR (with hub) other (reply with suggestion) 0 voters Show results

In whose name should we adopt whatever character we should adopt?

adopt in name of …

“Ferris the friendly rustacean”

“The Rust Community”

“Rustaceans for Unicode”

Other (reply with suggestion) 0 voters Show results

URL to include

(URLs can only be hyperlinked at silver or gold levels, but can be included as text at bronze)