RustWasm to Be Archived

If their’s one thing the Rust team has been really good at its always catching as off-guard with announcements. Last week Alex Crichton from the Compiler team announced they’re archiving the Rust and Web Assembly GitHub org, which feels like a bittersweet breakup.

The rustwasm GitHub org, once the cool kid of Rust’s WebAssembly scene, is getting the boot by September. After five years of radio silence, the Rust and WebAssembly Working Group was archived in 2024, and now it’s time to clean house.

The star of the show, wasm-bindgen, is getting a shiny new org and fresh maintainers to keep the party going. Everything else, like wasm-pack, gloo, and twiggy is either headed to the archive bin or handed off to maintainers who still care.

• Why? The rustwasm org’s been coasting on maintenance mode, leaving users and devs in a foggy mess of “who’s even running this thing?”

Here’s the spicy bit: wasm-bindgen’s move is a win for devs who lean on it for slick Rust-to-WebAssembly magic. New maintainers mean more updates and less stale code, which is clutch for your browser-based projects. But the rest of the repos? They’re either getting mothballed or need maintainers to step up - fast. If you’re relying on something like walrus or weedle, you might need to fork it or sweet-talk the admins on Zulip.

• The catch? The current admin’s not playing matchmaker for new maintainers, so don’t expect a quick handover.

All this matters because Rust’s WebAssembly ecosystem is still a hot ticket for building lean, mean browser apps. Archiving rustwasm clears the air, but it’s a wake-up call: fork what you need or risk being left with unmaintained code. For devs, it’s a chance to jump in, contribute, or at least keep an eye on wasm-bindgen’s new home.

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/rustaceans/rustwasm-to-be-archived-9b52b26bc274