To me, 2018 felt like a big turning point for Rust, and it wasn’t just the edition. Suddenly, it has become “normal” for me to meet people using Rust at their jobs. Rust conferences are growing and starting to have large number of sponsors. Heck, I even met some professional Rust developers amongst the parents at a kid’s birthday party recently. Something has shifted, and I like it.

At the same time, I’ve also noticed a lot of exhaustion. I know I feel it – and a lot of people I talk to seem to feel the same way. It’s great that so much is going on in the Rust world, but we need to get better at scaling our processes up and processing it effectively.

When I think about a “theme” for 2019, the word that keeps coming to mind for me is sustainability. I think Rust has been moving at a breakneck pace since 1.0, and that’s been great: it’s what Rust needed. But as Rust gains more solid footing out there, it’s a good idea for us to start looking for how we can go back and tend to the structures we’ve built.

Sustainable processes

There has been a lot of great constructive criticism of our current processes: most recently, boat’s post on organizational debt, along with Florian’s series of posts, did a great job of crystallizing a lot of the challenges we face. I am pretty confident that we can adjust our processes here and make things a lot better, though obviously some of these problems have no easy solution.

Obviously, I don’t know exactly what we should do here. But I think I see some of the pieces of the puzzle. Here is a variety of bullet points that have been kicking around in my head.

Working groups. In general, I would like to see us adopting the idea of working groups as a core “organizational unit” for Rust, and in particular as the core place where work gets done. A working group is an ad-hoc set of people that includes both members of the relevant Rust team but also interested volunteers. Among other benefits, they can be a great vehicle for mentoring, since it gives people a particular area to focus on, versus trying to participate in the Rust project as a whole, which can be very overwhelming.

Explicit stages. Right now, Rust features go through a number of official and semi-official stages before they become “stable”. As I have argued before, I think we would benefit from making these stages a more explicit part of the process (much as e.g. the TC39 and WebAssembly groups already do).

Finishing what we start. Right now, we have no mechanism to expose the “capacity” of our teams – we tend to, for example, accept RFCs without any idea who will implement it, or even mentor an implementation. In fact, there isn’t really a defined set of people to try and ensure that it happens. The result is that a lot of things linger in limbo, either unimplemented, undocumented, or unstabilized. I think working groups can help to solve this, by having a core leadership team that is committed to seeing the feature through.

Expose capacity. Continuing the previous point, I think we should integrate a notion of capacity into the staging process: so that we avoid moving too far in the design until we have some idea who is going to be implementing (or mentoring an implementation). If that is hard to do, then it indicates we may not have the capacity to do this idea right now – if that seems unacceptable, then we need to find something else to stop doing.

Don’t fly solo. One of the things that we discussed in a recent compiler team steering meeting is that being the leader of a working group is super stressful – it’s a lot to manage! However, being a co-leader of a working group is very different. Having someone else (or multiple someones) that you can share work with, bounce ideas off of, and so forth makes all the difference. It’s also a great mentoring opportunities, as the leaders of working groups don’t necessarily have to be full members of the team (yet). Part of exposing capacity, then, is trying to ensure that we don’t just have one person doing any one thing – we have multiple. This is scary: we will get less done. But we will all be happier doing it.

Evaluate priorities regularly. In my ideal world, we would make it very easy to find out what each person on a team is working on, but we would also have regular points where we evaluate whether those are the right things. Are they advancing our roadmap goals? Did something else more promising arise in the meantime? Part of the goal here is to leave room for serendipity: maybe some random person came in from the blue with an interesting language idea that seems really cool. We want to ensure we aren’t too “locked in” to pursue that idea. Incidentally, this is another benefit to not “flying solo” – if there are multiple leaders, then we can shift some of them around without necessarily losing context.

Keeping everyone in sync. Finally, I think we need to think hard about how to help keep people in sync. The narrow focus of working groups is great, but it can be a liability. We need to develop regular points where we issue “public-facing” updates, to help keep people outside the working group abreast of the latest developments. I envision, for example, meetings where people give an update on what’s been happening, the key decision and/or controversies, and seek feedback on interesting points. We should probably tie these to the stages, so that ideas cannot progress forward unless they are also being communicated.

TL;DR. The points above aren’t really a coherent proposal yet, though there are pieces of proposals in them. Essentially I am calling for a bit more structure and process, so that it is clearer what we are doing now and it’s more obvious when we are making decisions about what we should do next. I am also calling for more redundancy. I think that both of these things will initially mean that we do fewer things, but we will do them more carefully, and with less stress. And ultimately I think they’ll pay off in the form of a larger Rust team, which means we’ll have more capacity.

Sustainable technology

So what about the technical side of things? I think the “sustainable” theme fits here, too. I’ve been working on rustc for 7 years now (wow), and in all of that time we’ve mostly been focused on “getting the next goal done”. This is not to say that nobody ever cleans things up; there have been some pretty epic refactoring PRs. But we’ve also accumulated a fair amount of technical debt. We’ve got plenty of examples where a new system was added to replace the old – but only 90%, meaning that now we have two systems in use. This makes it harder to learn how rustc works, and it makes us spend more time fixing bugs and ICEs.

I would like to see us put a lot of effort into making rustc more approachable and maintaineable. This means writing documentation, both of the rustdoc and rustc-guide variety. It also means finishing up things we started but never quite finished, like replacing the remaining uses of NodeId with the newer HirId . In some cases, it might mean rewriting whole subsystems, such as with the trait system and chalk.

None of this means we can’t get new toys. Cleaning up the trait system implementation, for example, makes things like Generic Associated Types (GATs) and specialization much easier. Finishing the transition into the on-demand query system should enable better incremental compilation as well as more complete parallel compilation (and better IDE support). And so forth.

Finally, it seems clear that we need to continue our focus on reducing compilation time. I think we have a lot of good avenues to pursue here, and frankly a lot of them are blocked on needing to improve the compiler’s internal structure.

Sustainable finances

When one talks about sustainability, that naturally brings to mind the question of financial sustainability as well. Mozilla has been the primary corporate sponsor of Rust for some time, but we’re starting to see more and more sponsorship from other companies, which is great. This comes in many forms: both Google and Buoyant have been sponsoring people to work on the async-await and Futures proposals, for example (and perhaps others I am unaware of); other companies have used contracting to help get work done that they need; and of course many companies have been sponsoring Rust conferences for years.

Going into 2019, I think we need to open up new avenues for supporting the Rust project financially. As a simple example, having more money to help with running CI could enable us to parallelize the bors queue more, which would help with reducing the time to land PRs, which in turn would help everything move faster (not to mention improving the experience of contributing to Rust).

I do think this is an area where we have to tread carefully. I’ve definitely heard horror stories of “foundations gone wrong”, for example, where decisions came to be dominated more by politics and money than technical criteria. There’s no reason to rush into things. We should take it a step at a time.

From a personal perspective, I would love to see more people paid to work part- or full-time on rustc. I’m not sure how best to make that happen, but I think it is definitely important. It has happened more than once that great rustc contributors wind up taking a job elsewhere that leaves them no time or energy to continue contributing. These losses can be pretty taxing on the project.

Reference material

I already mentioned that I think the compiler needs to put more emphasis on documentation as a means for better sustainability. I think the same also applies to the language: I’d like to see the lang team getting more involved with the Rust Reference and really trying to fill in the gaps. I’d also like to see the Unsafe Code Guidelines work continue. I think it’s quite likely that these should be roadmap items in their own right.