The Rust Community

Rust is known for having a very helpful community. You can see dozens of links different community spaces prominently featured on the Rust homepage. This is a pretty big contrast to a lot of programming communities. In many languages there either isn’t a recognisable community, or there is one, but it can be unwelcoming or outright hostile to beginners.

A big part of this is that Rust was born out of Mozilla, which has a lot of experience managing open source communities. They established a code of conduct, a moderation team, user groups, forms, and open source development teams.

Another aspect is the language itself. Rust’s learning curve is both initially steep and long. Fortunately, this process isn’t painful because the difficulty does not come from ‘magic’. Rust is very explicit and almost everything works exactly the way you’d expect. Rather it comes from learning to work within the safety rules. It is sometimes complicated and isn’t similar to other languages. But this has a way of keeping people humble. In a lot of other languages, it’s easy to forget that things that seem second nature now used to be confusing.

So in some languages, you might be mocked for asking for help, or be unable to find it, or write what you think is right only to have things break at Runtime. With Rust, you might have to ask for help more or work harder to get things to compiler. But you’ll find lots of people will be happy to help. And once your code does compile, you can be fairly confident it is correct.

RFC process

TODO:

• Pluralism and positive sum game (multiple sources of authority working together)
• Different perspectives reach a better solution
  • Yelling lowder and ‘thicker skin’ is bad because it does not bring new insight
  • https://aturon.github.io/2018/06/02/listening-part-2/
  • Humility, empathy, and introspection
• Discuss
• Pre-rfc
• RFC
• Impl
• Nightly
• Crater to rebuild to world
• Beta - through release
• No new reasoning
• Committees and many perspectives.