The Story of the Rust Foundation

Image: Rust Foundation logo (credits: Rust Foundation)

Hello, Rustaceans We’re already halfway through the month. Keep that momentum rolling. In this issue, we’ll discuss how Rust Foundation came to be, present you a Rust challenge, spotlight an amazing Rust project, and share 10 incredible links of the week. Here’s issue 89 for you! MAIN NEWS

Ever wondered how the Rust Foundation came to be? Was it part of the grand plan or just inevitable chaos wrapped in bureaucracy? Let’s dig into its origin story, and what role it actually plays in Rust’s world today. Back in 2020, Mozilla and the Rust Core Team looked around and realized the language had outgrown its parent’s basement. Rust was no longer the experimental side gig, it was running in production at Amazon, powering Cloudflare edge services, and securing passwords at 1Password. But there was a catch: Rust had no legal entity, no formal way to handle contracts, and tragically, no budget for snacks. So, the idea of the Rust Foundation was born. Fast forward to February 18th, 2021, and Rust officially got its own place. The Rust Foundation was set up with some serious backers (AWS, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, and Mozilla) - basically the Avengers of tech funding.

Their mission? Make sure Rust doesn’t just trend on Hacker News but actually thrives as a sustainable, community-driven ecosystem.

The Foundation took over the boring-but-critical stuff like infrastructure, funding, policy, trademarks, and making sure crates.io doesn’t collapse under the weight of yet another dependency.

Of course, adulting comes with drama. In 2023, RustConf turned into RustConfrontation when internal disagreements over diversity policies went public.

Cue Reddit wars, resignations, and memes about “unsafe governance.” It was a reminder that even in a language obsessed with memory safety, emotions are still very much unprotected. Still, the Foundation keeps grinding, funding fellows, supporting community projects, and trying to make governance less “corporate cabal” and more “open source kumbaya.” The Rust Foundation is what keeps the ecosystem alive and kicking.

RUST CHALLENGE 🦀

Last week we had you solve the mirror_index challenge. Run-Length Decode Given a compressed string like “a3b2c1”, return its expanded version “aaabbc”. If this feels familiar, that’s because we tackled the reverse (String Compression) in issue 87.

Image: Rust_Bytes_Challenge_Issue_89_Run-Length Decode

Test your solution on Rust Playground (https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2024&gist=e1301ab7637c1d0b872cd835347675bb)

Read the full article here: https://medium.com/rustaceans/the-story-of-the-rust-foundation-57fca3c849ee