Microsoft joins Rust Foundation

Today we’re excited to share that Microsoft is joining industry partners as founding members of the Rust Foundation, a new independent organization established to steward the Rust programming language and ecosystem and support Rust’s maintainers. We look forward to collaborating with the Rust community to continue improving the Rust language, providing tooling and library support, creating learning resources, and more.

As Rust’s popularity has grown, it has continued to demonstrate outstanding language stewardship and a strong track record of keeping Rust true to its goals of performance, reliability, and productivity. It has been a joy for me to contribute to this success as the lead editor of This Week in Rust and as a member of several Rust working groups and teams.

I first encountered Rust as an intriguing systems programming language. The moment I experienced its incredibly welcoming and supportive community, I knew I would stay. Any open source project—especially a language ecosystem—is only as strong as its community of users and contributors. The creation of the Rust Foundation ensures that Rust will remain driven by and for the global Rustacean community.

Open source software and languages are of critical importance both to Microsoft and to the entire tech industry. This is especially true for systems programming languages like Rust. As Rust usage in Microsoft grows, we know it is not enough to only use it as open source software. We must also contribute back to it. Joining the Rust Foundation is a way for us to financially support the project, contribute back to the project, and engage more deeply with the Rust community.

Additionally, we are forming a Rust team within Microsoft to contribute engineering efforts to the Rust ecosystem. We expect to be working with the Rust community on the compiler, core tooling, documentation, and more.

To learn more about the Rust Foundation and participate, visit the Rust Foundation website.

Subscribe here to This Week in Rust.

Nell Shamrell-Harrington

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft, and Board Director at the Rust Foundation

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