The Rust Foundation, the recently formed non-profit organization that has stewardship of the Rust programming language is welcoming Facebook as a new Platinum member, its top-level tier. Four Silver Tier members have also been announced.

The open-source Rust project started life at Mozilla but was effectively cut adrift as a result of the Mozilla layoffs in August 2020. As we reported at the time, the Rust Foundation was set up in February 2021 to provide support and governance for the future of the Rust language which had already been widely adopted throughout the software industry.

Facebook now joins AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla who were the founding Platinum member organizations and Joel Marcey, Open Source ecosystem lead at Facebook will be joining the Rust Foundation's Board of Directors as Facebook's Member Director.

Quoted on the Facebook blog, Marcey explains:

“We are joining the Rust Foundation to help contribute to, improve and grow this language that has become so valuable to us and developers around the world. We look forward to participating with the other foundation members and the Rust community to make Rust a mainstream language of choice for systems programming and beyond.”

As an early adopter of Rust Facebook has been using it since 2016 in many aspects of development, from source control to compilers. As well has having teams throughout the company writing Rust code, Facebook has a dedicated Rust team that is primarily responsible for the growth of Rust development inside the company, open source contributions to Rust and Rust-based projects, and engagement with the Rust community.

Patrick Walton, a long-term Rust contributor and a Rust team lead at Facebook commented:

“When I joined Facebook, I was amazed at how much use Rust was getting throughout the stack. I'm really excited to see us take our contributions to the language to the next level. Joining the Rust Foundation is a great step that signals a commitment to improve the language and ecosystem for years to come.”

The Rust Foundation has also welcomed four companies as its first Silver Tier members. They are:

• Zama, which builds open-source homomorphic encryption solutions for data science and AI and uses Rust from its cryptographic library to its machine learning frameworks.
• Ferrous Systems, which employs maintainers of the Rust compiler and provides training and services on the Rust ecosytem. Its  Ferrocene project aims to enable Rust in safety-critical spaces.
• Tag1Consulting, a global technology consulting firm that relies on Rust for projects such as goose.rs, a highly scalable loadtesting tool inspired by the Python-based Locust Framework.
• CleverCloud,  an IT Automation platform that has been present in the Rust community since early in Rust's history.  

Being ejected from its erstwhile home by Mozilla appears to have given a boost to Rust. Back in November AWS revealed its commitment to the language, see Amazon AWS Invests In Rust. and since the Foundation was formed we have reported that Google is adding support for Rust as a development language for the Android operating system and that Microsoft has embarked on a project to present the Windows API to a Rust program via the windows crate.

While Facebook claims that:

Joining the Rust Foundation strengthens Facebook’s commitment to support the sustainable development of open source technologies and developer communities

it also provides another boost to Rust's standing among emerging computer languages.

More Information

Rust Foundation Website

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Amazon AWS Invests In Rust

Google Supports Rust For Android OS Development

Microsoft Offers Rust For Windows

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