If your company is interested in funding Rust maintainers, please reach out to me or @erikjee.bsky.social!

You can find our sponsors prospectus here: rustnl.org/resources/Ru...

Let me know if you want to talk! 💛

(Message me through Bluesky, Mastodon, Rust Zulip, or email: mara@rustnl.org)

Over the last few months, we have spoken to the Rust Foundation and several big companies about our plans. The input we've received and the positive reactions so far makes us believe we can make this happen. Today, we are publishing our plans for a wider audience, in search for the required funding.

What we need now is companies who rely on Rust to step up and contribute financially. Having your business rely on the work of unpaid volunteers is not sustainable in the long term. It's a risk.

And if your company contributes to Rust, keeping the project well-maintained will accelerate your work.

Additionally, we'll provide internships and mentorship, to help retain promising new contributors.

Not only do we need to make sure the current generation of maintainers doesn't burn out, we need to work on the next generation of maintainers too.

Through RustNL, the non-profit foundation behind the largest Rust conference (RustWeek) and the Rust Project's All Hands, we are setting up a fund to provide stable jobs for Rust maintainers. We want to employ six full-time maintainers in 2026.

A significant number of Rust maintainers who got paid for that have lost or quit their job recently. Due to RTO policies, a shift in responsibilities, budget cuts, and/or burnout. This is already quite noticable in the Rust project: longer review queues and more technical debt. This is a problem.

General maintenance is one of the most fundamental jobs in an open source project, but is one of the hardest to get paid for. Adding new features gets you promoted; keeping the lights on does not.

But everything depends on it. Code needs reviews, cleanups, docs. New contributors need mentors, etc.

Thanks to everyone who I worked with on the Rust standard library and language. It has been a pleasure. Our paths will definitely cross again. 💛

4/4

I'm excited to find something new that gives me energy and motivation. Most likely, that new thing will have something to do with Rust, but I don't know yet what exactly that will be. Maybe teaching Rust, or writing another book, or solving #burnout in open source.. we'll see. :)

3/4

I'll probably still be occasionally reviewing and contributing, but I don't have any energy left to stay involved as much as I used to. At least for now.

I'll still be a member of the Rust project, as part of the leadership council and organization of the Rust All-Hands 2026.

2/4

I urge companies to take funding contributors seriously, in ways that aren’t tied to projects and goals. Being a generalist in the compiler meant that often I wasn’t working towards a roadmap, but my contributions *always* paid off in the long term extensibility of the language.

How else am I going to store a copy of all of crates.io in ram? ;)