I'm extremely pleased to see the rust project reach its first major turning-point release, 1.0-alpha . This is not the "ok you can all come play now" signal, but it's a signal that the breaks are applied, the language featureset is done, and the libraries will finish being nailed down sometime in the next couple (short) six-week cycles. It has been an enormous struggle for the team to get where they were going. I have more to write about this but I'm recovering from a bad flu presently so need to save my strength for rest, delivery pizza and 80s movies.Out of curiosity -- and to put some perspective on the churn rate the poor project maintainers have been absorbing all this time, as well as what "project leader" winds up looking like in practice -- I ran a query against the current source repo. There are 343,510 lines in it. I am the 3rd highest non-robot committer in the history, now a little down from Patrick (still totally outmatched by Brian). Excluding adventures in bulk-relicensing, there are currently a mere 5,293 lines there that I wrote. Of that, 3,126 lines -- the majority! -- is docs, configure and build infrastructure. There are 2,167 lines of Actually Meaningful Code from me in there, which is mostly statistical test vectors and POSIX typedefs. Here, I extracted it for amusement sake This is as it should be. It's a somewhat strange feeling, but "success" in a big software project generally looks like "enough other people got involved that my own contributions vanish in the activity". Rust has grown to be a remarkably collective project: 559 contributors!Congratuations, everyone.