Rust - 4+ years later

May 15, 2019 - Reading time: 2 minutes.

Exactly 4 years ago, on May 15th 2015, the Rust Core Team announced the first stable version, Version 1.0, of the Rust Programming language.

I started my Rust journey even earlier than that, somewhere around August 2014, in parallel to my Bachelor thesis. Shortly after my first blog post, I gave a last minute talk titled "Rust for Rubyists" at RedFrogConf, a (Ruby-focused) subconf of FrOSCon. Back then Rust had "lightweight green tasks"!

Two months before the 1.0 release I spoke at CCCAC about Rust (those slides were built on minimal JavaScript so it could run in Servo). I remember that I spent a lot of time on explaining the (safe) thread API. Not only did I make a mistake in the explanation (and the code), but also shortly after the scoped thread API was found to be unsound and subsequently removed (use crossbeam's thread::scope API if you need something similar but safe and sound now).

Then 1.0 came, more stuff was ripped out just before that and we got the first edition of The Rust Programming Language book. Work obviously didn't stop there.

In 2016 we created the first ever RustFest, a community conference dedicated to Rust. Due to luck and enthusiasm of many more people we managed to pull of another RustFest just half a year later and then four more editions after that (I missed only the Zurich one). The sixth edition, RustFest Barcelona, is already announced.

In 2014 Florian and Johann founded the Rust Berlin Hack and Learn. Last year, when I joined Mozilla and moved to Berlin, I became a co-organizer of that .

Today we're celebrating, but not just Rust's birthday, but also over 100 events under the Rust Berlin label (that includes our bi-weekly Hack and Learn, infrequent Rust Berlin talk meetups and the Rust & Tell).

A month after I joined Mozilla, the first ever Rust All-Hands happened in the Berlin office and, as so much about my involvement with Rust, I stumbled into being the responsible on-site person during that week. It went pretty well. We repeated the Rust All-Hands this year (German article), now with me being officially the on-site organizer, but also attendee.

In 2017 I shipped my first piece of Rust code used in production (an actual opera production): midioscar. A couple of weeks ago I started my first Mozilla project using Rust (more about that in a future blog post).

Not only did Rust become a community I invest my time and resources in, it is now also officially part of my job.

We're at Rust 1.34.2 now (that's over 34 36 releases in 4 years!), with even more improvements, bug fixes, community conferences, hack fests and All Hands ahead of us. Rust is here to stay.