Hi there.

As the Rust machine barrels ever-onward, contributors arrive, make their mark, and inevitably depart. Today I want to tell you about two people who have made a massive impact on Rust, and who are stepping down from their roles on the Rust team.

Huon Wilson and Alexis Beingessner are now Rust team alumni.

Huon Wilson came to Rust all the way back in 2012. Damn, has it been that long? In the time since he’s done all kinds of amazing things: organized community events in Australia, written knowledgeable and influential blog posts about Rust, joined Mozilla as a summer intern, became one of the initial members of the core team, influenced the direction of Rust’s math support and random number generation, optimized the standard library, and many other important things that I can’t remember or comprehend.

Alexis Beingessner came to Rust like a whirlwind, and in his wake left a trail of powerful collections libraries and hilarious (but fantastically informative) documentation ((1) (2) (3) (4)). During his internship with Mozilla he helped clarify how to write safe abstractions from unsafe code, and as a member of the libs team he has been instrumental in defining the core abstractions used by all Rustaceans, as well as the conventions that define quality Rust libraries.

They live on in our hearts, and in our IRC channels.