Joint Endeavor: Facebook Advances Rust Development

The Rust Foundation, the non-profit membership organization dedicated to supporting the maintenance of the popular Rust programming language, has a new member in the form of Facebook.

Joining at the Rust Foundation’s highest “platinum” member level, Facebook will commit to “sustaining and growing the Rust open source ecosystem and community.” As part of its membership, Joel Marcey, open-source ecosystem lead at Facebook, will become a board director at the foundation.

A Beloved Programming Language

In a statement , Ashley Williams, Interim Executive Director of the Rust Foundation, said that:

Facebook has been a strong supporter of Rust for a while now—I remember first meeting them at a Rust Belt Rust conference in 2017. I’m incredibly excited to have them join, and to have Joel serve as its board representative. His experience is broad and varied in ways that are incredibly relevant to Rust right now, from standards bodies to documentation frameworks. I think his perspective will be incredibly valuable as the Foundation fulfills its mission to support the Rust maintainers.

Rust developed from a personal project started in 2006 by Mozilla employee Graydon Hoare. It has been hugely successful since then , having been voted the “most loved” coding language as part of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for every year since 2016. Aside from the newly joining Facebook, other members of the Rust Foundation—which launched this year—include Mozilla, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Facebook has long been a booster of the Rust language. It initially used Rust for its internal source control tool in 2016. Following the new announcement about the Rust Foundation, Facebook is reportedly upping its internal developer support for Rust during 2021. As well as having different teams throughout the company coding in Rust, the social networking giant has a “dedicated Rust team” responsible for the growth of, and contribution toward, Rust projects—as well as overall engagement with Rust’s developer community.

Embracing Rust

“Facebook has embraced Rust since 2016 and utilizes it in all aspects of development, from source control to compilers,” said Joel Marcey, Open Source ecosystem lead at Facebook, and the new Rust Foundation board director. “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.”