Rust’s Rapid Rise: Foundation Fuels Language Growth

During last week’s RustConf 2024, the Rust Foundation released its report on the state of Rust programming.

The report covers various technical initiatives and contributions made by the Rust Foundation to support the Rust programming language and ecosystem.

Areas of Focus

Key areas of focus in the report include Crates.io improvements, the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium, the Rust-C++ Interoperability Initiative, the Security Initiative, a look at infrastructure support and the Rust Language Specification.

“The Rust Foundation’s mission is to steward the Rust language, community, and broader ecosystem. This report is exciting because it sheds light on our engineering initiatives that support this mission,” Joel Marcey, the Rust Foundation’s director of technology, told The New Stack. “Our recent work and collaborations around Rust language security and interoperability are particularly exciting.”

The Rust Foundation’s technical focus areas have proliferated since its inception in 2021 — and over time, the foundation has developed deep, collaborative relationships with many members of the Rust Project, Rebecca Rumbul, executive director and CEO of the Rust Foundation, told The New Stack.

“We also have more full-time engineers working for the foundation than ever, critical support from some of the most innovative organizations in open source, and a growing portfolio of programs and initiatives aimed at helping individual maintainers, new Rust users, governments, and professional organizations adopt and find success with Rust,” Rumbul said.

Crates.io

As the official package registry for the Rust programming language, crates.io plays a critical role in the Rust ecosystem. Aside from being the place where Rust users share their own libraries and packages, crates.io makes it easier for other developers to find tools that solve specific issues they are encountering and expand upon their own work.

Given this significance, the Rust Foundation helps fund and support improvements to make crates.io more secure, organized, and performant. The foundation’s recent contributions to crates.io were made possible by financial support from the Rust Foundation Security Initiative, from the Alpha-Omega Project and from Rust Foundation Platinum Member, AWS.

Crates.io improvements include admin functionality, crate download changes, test suite migration, and database performance optimizations.

The foundation’s recent crates.io contributions were carried out by two Rust Foundation members: Tobias Bieniek, a Rust Foundation software engineer, co-lead of the Rust Project crates.io team, and longtime Rust Project contributor; and Adam Harvey, a Rust Foundation software engineer and crates.io team member.

In April, the crates.io test suite was migrated to async tests to make it easier to use async-only. Also, among other improvements, a new archive version download background job was created and old, unneeded data was archived, ultimately allowing the crates.io team to shrink the crates.io database significantly and improve performance.

The crates.io team also implemented a change to make it easier for users to install crates.

Safety-Critical Rust Consortium

In June, the foundation announced a new group dedicated to the responsible use of Rust in safety-critical software, hosted by the Rust Foundation. Founding participants and foundation members of the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium include founding participants and Rust Foundation members AdaCore, Arm, Ferrous Systems, HighTec EDV-Systeme GmbH, Lynx Software Technologies, OxidOS, TECHFUND, and Veecle, as well as TrustInSoft and Woven by Toyota.

The primary objective of this group is to support the use of the Rust programming language in safety-critical software — systems whose failure can impact human life or cause severe environmental or property harm.

Rust, C++ Interoperability

In February, the Rust Foundation announced a new effort to improve the state of interoperability between the Rust and C++ programming languages, made possible through a $1M contribution from Google, a Platinum Member of the foundation.

In June, Jon Bauman joined the Rust Foundation as its Rust-C++ Interop Engineer and began working on the structure and vision of the Interop Initiative. A summary and outline of this initial research are being developed, including a problem statement about the state of Rust-C++ interoperability, an outline of impacted groups and sectors, and a list of short and long-term goals for the initiative.

Rust Security Initiative

Meanwhile, the Security Initiative focused on supply chain security, crates.io token security, threat modeling, and developing security tools like Painter and Typomania.

“Rust is rightfully seen as a secure language and ecosystem. So we like to try to stay ahead of potential security issues that could arise in the future,” Marcey said. “Some of the projects that the Foundation is working on like Painter and Typomania try to tackle these potential issues head on where we try to understand the potential pathways if vulnerable code arises or if people try to typosquat crates.”

Rust Language Spec

Progress on the Rust Language Specification includes appointing a team lead and hiring a specification consultant.

“The Rust Project and its awesome maintainers are innovating the language every day,” Marcey said. “They recently released their Project goals for the rest of 2024 and into 2025 which provides a nice accounting of where the language priorities are.”

In addition to Google’s contribution of $1M, the foundation received contributions from Microsoft also for $1M, $460,000 from the Alpha-Omega Project for the Security Project, and $100,000 from Lambda Class.

Moreover, infrastructure support was provided by various organizations, including AWS, Fastly, GitHub, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The report acknowledged the collaborative efforts between the Rust Foundation, Rust Project teams, and various corporate supporters in advancing the Rust initiatives.

Darryl K. Taft covers DevOps, software development tools and developer-related issues from his office in the Baltimore area. He has more than 25 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. He has worked…

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