Three years ago today, the Rust community released Rust 1.0 to the world, with our initial vision of fearless systems programming. As per tradition, we’ll celebrate Rust’s birthday by taking stock of the people and the product, and especially of what’s happened in the last year.

The People

Rust is a people-centric, consensus-driven project. Some of the most exciting developments over the last year have to do with how the project itself has grown, and how its processes have scaled.

The official teams that oversee the project doubled in size in the last year; there are now over a hundred individuals associated with one or more of the teams. To accommodate this scale, the team structure itself has evolved. We have top-level teams covering the language, library ecosystem, developer tooling, documentation, community, and project operations. Nested within these are dozens of subteams and working groups focused on specific topics.

Rust is now used in a huge variety of companies, including both newcomers and big names like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Microsoft, Red Hat, npm and, of course, Mozilla; it’s also in the top 15 languages this year on GitHub. As a byproduct, more and more developers are being paid to contribute back to Rust, many of them full time. As of today, Mozilla employees make up only 11% of the official Rust teams, and just under half of the total number of people paid to work on Rust. (You can read detailed whitepapers about putting Rust into production here.)

Finally, the Rust community continues to work on inclusivity, through outreach programs like Rust Reach and RustBridge, as well as structured mentoring and investments in documentation to ease contribution. For 2018, a major goal is to connect and empower Rust’s global community, which we’re doing both through conference launches in multiple new continents, as well as work toward internationalization throughout the project.

The Product

If you spend much time reading this blog, you’ll know that the major theme of our work over the past year has been productivity. As we said in last year’s roadmap:

From tooling to libraries to documentation to the core language, we want to make it easier to get things done with Rust.

This work will culminate in a major release later this year: Rust 2018 Edition. The release will bring together improvements in every area of the project, polished into a new “edition” that bundles the changes together with updated documentation and onboarding. The roadmap has some details about what to expect.

The components that make up Rust 2018 will be shipped as they become ready on the stable compiler. Recent releases include:

The next couple of releases will include stable SIMD support, procedural macros, custom allocators, and more. The final big features — lifetime system improvements and async/await — should both reach feature complete status on nightly within weeks. Vital tools like the RLS and rustfmt are also being polished for the new edition, including RFCs for finalizing the style and stability stories.

To help tie all this work to real-world use-cases, we’ve also targeted four domains for which Rust provides a compelling end-to-end story that we want to show the world as part of Rust 2018. Each domain has a dedicated working group and is very much open for new contributors:

As Rust 2018 comes into focus, we plan to provide a “preview” of the new edition for cutting-edge community members to try out. Over the past couple of weeks we kicked off a sprint to get the basics nailed down, but we need more help to get it ready for testing. If you’re interested, you can dive into:

The Postscript

Rust’s growth continues to accelerate at a staggering rate. It has been voted the Most Loved Language on StackOverflow for all three years since it shipped. Its community has never been healthier or more welcoming. If you’re curious about using or contributing to Rust, there’s never been a better time to get involved.

Happy 3rd birthday, Rust.