Today marks Rust's sixth birthday since it went 1.0 in 2015. A lot has changed since then and especially over the past year, and Rust was no different. In 2020, there was no foundation yet, no const generics, and a lot of organisations were still wondering whether Rust was production ready.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of Rust's global distributed set of team members and volunteers shipped over nine new stable releases of Rust, in addition to various bugfix releases. Today, "Rust in production" isn't a question, but a statement. The newly founded Rust foundation has several members who value using Rust in production enough to help continue to support and contribute to its open development ecosystem.
We wanted to take today to look back at some of the major improvements over the past year, how the community has been using Rust in production, and finally look ahead at some of the work that is currently ongoing to improve and use Rust for small and large scale projects over the next year. Let's get started!
The Rust language has improved tremendously in the past year, gaining a lot of quality of life features, that while they don't fundamentally change the language, they help make using and maintaining Rust in more places even easier.
const fn
s, and allowing procedural macros to be used in more places, have allowed completely powerful new types of APIs and crates to be created.Rustc wasn't the only tool that had significant improvements.
Each year Rust's growth and adoption in the community and industry has been unbelievable, and this past year has been no exception. Once again in 2020, Rust was voted StackOverflow's Most Loved Programming Language. Thank you to everyone in the community for your support, and help making Rust what it is today.
With the formation of the Rust foundation, Rust has been in a better position to build a sustainable open source ecosystem empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. A number of companies that use Rust have formed teams dedicated to maintaining and improving the Rust project, including AWS, Facebook, and Microsoft.
And it isn't just Rust that has been getting bigger. Larger and larger companies have been adopting Rust in their projects and offering officially supported Rust APIs.
Of course, all that is just to start, we're seeing more and more initiatives putting Rust in exciting new places;
rust-gpu
, a new compiler backend that allows writing graphics shaders using Rust for GPUs.Right now the Rust teams are planning and coordinating the 2021 edition of Rust. Much like this past year, a lot of themes of the changes are around improving quality of life. You can check out our recent post about "The Plan for the Rust 2021 Edition" to see what the changes the teams are planning.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg; there are a lot more changes being worked on, and exciting new open projects being started every day in Rust. We can't wait to see what you all build in the year ahead!
Are there changes, or projects from the past year that you're excited about? Are you looking to get started with Rust? Do you want to help contribute to the 2021 edition? Then come on over, introduce yourself, and join the discussion over on our Discourse forum and Zulip chat! Everyone is welcome, we are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, religion, or similar personal characteristic.