The Rust programming language, which has been gaining traction lately as a mechanism for building safe, high-performance, system-level software, is now under the jurisdiction of the Rust Foundation, an independent, non-profit organization chartered to steward the language and the ecosystem around it.
In a bulletin published February 8, the Rust project is heralding the arrangement as the arrival of Rust as an enterprise-grade, production-ready technology. Key to the organization is a supporting a set of maintainers to govern and develop the project.
The arrangement includes a financial commitment from a number of global companies and board of directors representatives from longtime Rust sponsor Mozilla, Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, and Huawei. Five directors have been drawn from project leadership, with two representing the Rust Core Team and three from project areas including reliability, quality, and collaboration.
The Rust Foundation will not replace the existing community or technical governance, but will host Rust infrastructure and support the community, Mozilla said in a statement welcoming the new foundation. Mozilla, Rust’s original home, has transferred all trademark and infrastructure assets to the Rust Foundation. The Rust crates.io package registry is included with this transfer.
Mozilla has undergone some trials and tribulations lately, with a restructuring last August prompting 250 layoffs. Another former Mozilla project, the Servo browser engine, moved to the Linux Foundation in November. Rust began as a Mozilla-sponsored research project in 2010.
The formation of the Rust Foundation marks Rust’s move to a fully independent organization. The programming language has been picking up steam in recent years and currently ranks 16th in the Pypl Popularity of Programming Language index. Microsoft is forming a Rust team to support the use of the language by internal product groups.