The Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund
54 comments
·November 4, 2025mperham
oli-obk
Yea, this is just the "find money" side of things. We're figuring out the details of how to decide what/who to fund in parallel
stefanos82
If you go to the main page and scroll down a bit, you will see the big names having their logos hosted there...
boje
Why doesn't Zig attract the same sort of lukewarm response that Rust does from parts of communities?
Macha
Rust came first, so people who didn't like Rust flocked to Zig as an alternative, and were keen to promote it as an alternative to Rust by criticising Rust, as wider usage would provide them more of an ecosystem to use in their own Zig programs.
People who were happy with Rust didn't have same need to criticise Zig in online spaces as Rust is the established player in the C alternatives space. (Though Rust is on the other side when compared to C once you expand the space to "all low level programming languages").
Also for people who don't care about the space at all, Rust has had years of exposure to promote fatigue, while Zig hasn't (yet).
null
stusmall
It isn't all of the objection, but there is a non-neglible amount of anti-woke people who find some weak technical reason to hate rust. It's silly but you'll be amazed in how often you see it line up when checking a random sampling of people who show up in rust threads just to make off topic complaints about rust.
EDIT: I hadn't fully gone through the comment section on this one yet and yikes it's worse about it than normal.
chekibreki
1. tl;dr and full of low-information and cringe vocabulary such as „excited“, „thrilled“, „challenge“, … Why are they wasting the readers time with this?
2. I would support because I like and use Rust but only if I have guarantees that the money will be spend only on developers who are selected merely by technical contributions and not based on political beliefs, gender, race, etc. And unfortunately from what I’ve heard the Rust community is one of the snowflakiest communities on the internet. I don’t want to fund that.
telestew
bit sad that I misread "Fund" in the title as "Feud" at first and didn't think anything of it
LucidLynx
I would actually support the Rust Foundation (and the Rust programming language itself) if the language had respected the promises it made in early 2012 / 2013 (the year I adopted the Rust programming language for my software):
* A programming language simpler than C++...
* That does not change so much accross time (maybe the biggest lie here)...
* With great design changes and adoption (it was before async/await, obviously)...
* Abstracted from big companies (again a lie, as Amazon hires most of the heads of the Rust programming language now)...
* With a great non-political community (actually, this is the biggest lie of all).
To me, it is a mess.
steveklabnik
Where were these things promised to you? I was there then too, and maybe one or two of these things were relevant if you squint, but also many of them were actively not promised.
LucidLynx
I agree that those were not actually "promises" but "directions", and I apologise for that. Those directions were mainly cited in different conferences by some Rust-head-members at that time (Alex Crichton, Niko Matsakis, Ashley Williams, or even you), and during conversations I had with severals during Rust Fest or RustCon.
For example, I remember talking that with you at the Rust Fest 2017, in Zurich actually, especially about the *very early version* of Async/Await.
It is ok for the community to move on different directions than the first one, and I don't blame any of you for that.
steveklabnik
Niko and Alex were the only ones in leadership in 2013, I didn't until 2014, and Ashley later. Rust Fest and Rust Con didn't come along until much later.
> It is ok for the community to move on different directions than the first one
I agree, I just disagree with your characterization of "the first one." There were differences between the original Rust and what shipped, but almost none of it has to do with what you've said. In 2012-2013, Rust very explicitly changed a lot across time, and now it certainly does not. Async/await drove a lot of that adoption. Rust was always "political", even before 2012.
ratmice
> * With a great non-political community (actually, this is the biggest lie of all).
I recall the opposite, that the rust language (before the foundation) position was that being apolitical was a political stance. This is not the exact message I remember https://x.com/rustlang/status/1267519582505512960 and also can't realistically cover the entire community at large, as if that even has a single political stance.
jdright
The group that insists on keeping a community or software project 'non-political' often fails to recognize that this stance is itself a political position. They claim to want a neutral space, but what they really mean is that the existing political view does not align with their own. By dismissing other perspectives as 'political' while treating their own as neutral, they end up being both hypocritical and unwilling (or unable) to acknowledge that their opinions are political too.
munificent
> non-political community
"Non-political community" is an oxymoron, like "non-aquatic lake". Politics is the verb that communities do.
Certhas
Non-political almost always means "accept the social status quo I am used to".
I think there is a reasonable argument that the default for a community with technical goals should be to accept social status quo conventions unless they conflict with the communities technical goals. But if the social default is "girls don't code and queers should hide" there is a reasonable counterargument that these conflict with the goal of making the technology (and community) available to everyone.
philipallstar
> But if the social default is "girls don't code and queers should hide"
Queers should hide definitely isn't any social default unless the code is exclusively developed in Gaza. "Do what you like but please stick to technical considerations" isn't "you need to hide".
echelon
> "Non-political community" is an oxymoron
No it's not.
I'm an LGBT person with a trans partner and I find many codes of conduct to be chastising and purposefully finger pointing to conservative people.
A lot of them are basically, "your religious teachings or cultural upbringing aren't welcome here"
I don't agree with religious texts, but that's what you're wagging in their face with some of the CoCs.
Leave it at "don't be an asshole". It's that simple.
The current political climate, I feel, is a direct reaction to this.
A politically neutral space wouldn't permit religious people to harass trans or LGBT people, but it also wouldn't give anyone latitude to throw stones the other way either.
CoCs are "you're not welcome here at all".
Another thing: you always see language and project logos modified to bear the rainbow, trans, and BLM colors. You never see anything supporting Asians, white people, men, or Christians. If you did this, you would be called out as a racist. Which is so ironic.
Let's just get along and work together. Maybe we'll find more agreements amongst ourselves that way instead of trying to divide everyone into camps.
Some progressives are going to get very pissed off at this comment, but I grew up and live in the South. You can (and often must) work with people you don't agree with. It's not impossible to be friends either. You might wind up changing their mind, and they might wind up making you more tolerant as well.
vacuity
I agree with you, although of course "don't be an asshole" is only simple to enforce in practice. In the current climate, I expect that people considered "conservative" will still be highly hostile to good faith (let alone not) enforcements.
No matter the person, it's really disappointing that we're still entrenched in the mentalities of tribalism, anti-intellectualism, "if you're not with us, you're against us", "an eye for an eye", "someone hurt me, so I'm going to hurt someone", and so on. And by "person", that includes me.
The Earth politics patch really can't come soon enough. How much do we pay the devs, again?
JoshTriplett
> You can (and often must) work with people you don't agree with.
Life's for too short to force people to do this, and ideally we should make it as feasible as possible for as many people as possible to never have to do this.
clipsy
> A lot of them are basically, "your religious teachings or cultural upbringing aren't welcome here"
Could you point out a code of conduct -- preferably from a large, well known project -- that reads this way in your opinion?
oguz-ismail
[dead]
oli-obk
Amazon fired every Rust project team member except Niko and weihanglo over the last year. Which is a major contributor to why the foundation started looking into funding maintainers
weird_trousers
I don't agree with some points, but I share the feeling in terms of "failed promises".
The fact that most well-known Rust crates are becoming huge bloat are becoming a problem to me, which is something that has been critized years again by the community itself.
As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
escobar_west
So let me get this straight. You want the benefit of being able to re-use other peoples' codebase by using an HTTP crate you didn't write. But you don't want those people to also use that benefit of depending on other crates.
Insisting that you should depend on code which itself has no dependencies is a bit hypocritical if you ask me. If you want a simple HTTP crate that doesn't have dependencies, you should follow your own philosophy of not using other crates and write it yourself.
aw1621107
> As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
Looking at ureq [0], for example, its direct non-build/non-dev dependencies are (counting duplicates):
- base64
- flate2 (4 transitive dependencies)
- log
- percent-encoding
- rustls (26 transitive dependencies)
- rustls-pki-types (1 transitive dependency)
- ureq-proto (7 transitive dependencies)
- utf-8
- webpki-roots (2 transitive dependencies)
The vast majority of the raw dependency count comes from Rustls and related crates, and I'd imagine reimplementing a TLS stack would be somewhat out of scope for an HTTP crate. I'm not sure there's much room for substantial reductions in dependency count otherwise.
MisterTea
> As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
This is what you get with package managers.
nixpulvis
I think it's clear to me that Rust needs to start admitting more into the STD to help with this and increase the consistency across the ecosystem.
vacuity
No, I think the idea of blessing a set of crates (with versions!) is better. The stdlib has a high burden of maintenance, and ideally should only be added to if changes are always backwards compatible. A blessed set is more flexible but still provides a high degree of reliability, unlike the present situation.
Ygg2
This has happened already. See https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/cell/struct.LazyCell.html
It's just it's not frequent.
There is very few things that need to be in the standard library. I only ever miss chrono or equivalent not being in std.
johnisgood
> A programming language simpler than C++..
That made me chuckle because both are quite the behemoths, as I have previously said. If they promised this, it was a lie indeed.
ekropotin
I have to disagree. Rust is not even close to behemothness of C++.
johnisgood
Perhaps, but it is definitely not a C replacement, but a replacement of C++.
doyougnu
I haven't dabbled in rust since 2018, but if rust has managed to be as complicated as C++ while being a fraction of the age then I would think that would be some kind of macabre achievement in its own right.
afdbcreid
Both are, indeed, and I don't know if this was ever promised, but Rust is way simpler than C++ (today, at least).
BoredPositron
I don't give a damn about politics so I don't care what politics the language I use likes or not. If someone believes people should not exists because of their political or religious stance, sexuality or origin. We don't have a political problem we have one of morality and I don't compromise in that regard.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
Everything is political, people are picking sides, and I'm on the same side as Rust
vacuity
Is "Rust" a homogeneous blob of beliefs that you can side with?
oguz-ismail
[dead]
It's interesting to note that this doesn't actually discuss any funding details. Who, how much, when, how? The devil is always in the details.