Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation – Mozilla & Firefox

Today Mozilla is thrilled to join the Rust community in announcing the formation of the Rust Foundation. The Rust Foundation will be the home of the popular Rust programming language that began within Mozilla. Rust has long been bigger than just a Mozilla project and todays announcement is the culmination of many years of community building and collaboration. Mozilla is pleased to be a founding Platinum Sponsor of the Rust Foundation and looks forward to working with it to help Rust continue to grow and prosper.

Rust is an open-source programming language focused on safety, speed and concurrency. It started life as a side project in Mozilla Research. Back in 2010, Graydon Hoare presented work on something he hoped would become a slightly less annoying programming language that could deliver better memory safety and more concurrency. Within a few years, Rust had grown into a project with an independent governance structure and contributions from inside and outside Mozilla. In 2015, the Rust project announced the first stable release, Rust 1.0.

Success quickly followed. Rust is so popular that it has been voted the most most-loved programming language in Stack Overflows developer survey for five years in a row. Adoption is increasing as companies big and small, scientists, and many others discover its power and usability. Mozilla used Rust to build Stylo, the CSS engine in Firefox (replacing approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust).

It takes a lot for a new programming language to be successful. Rusts growth is thanks to literally thousands of contributors and a strong culture of inclusion. The wide range of contributors and adopters has made Rust a better language for everyone.

Mozilla is proud of its role in Rusts creation and we are happy to see it outgrow its origins and secure a dedicated organization to support its continued evolution. Given its reach and impact, Rust will benefit from an organization that is 100% focused on the project.

The new Rust Foundation will have board representation from a wide set of stakeholders to help set a path to its own future. Other entities will be able to provide direct financial resources to Rust beyond in-kind contributions. The Rust Foundation will not replace the existing community and technical governance for Rust. Rather, it will be the organization that hosts Rust infrastructure, supports the community, and stewards the language for the benefit of all users.

Mozilla joins all Rustaceans in welcoming the new Rust Foundation.

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Mozilla Welcomes the Rust Foundation - Mozilla & Firefox