Rust shares roadmap for 2019

Yesterday, the Rust team shared its 2019 roadmap, which includes the areas they plan to focus on for the Rust project. This roadmap is based on 2018’s survey results, direct conversations with individual Rust users, and discussions at the 2019 Rust All Hands gathering.

The Rust team sees 2019 as a year of “rejuvenation and maturation for the Rust project”. This year, they plan to focus on the following three areas:

Improving governance

Within the past three years, the Rust project has seen very impressive growth. It now boasts of up to 5000 contributors and over 100 project members. So, those processes that used to serve the small team, has now started to show some cracks. This is why the team plans to revisit these processes.

As a part of this focus area, a group called Governance Working Group has been created that will work with each team to help them improve their governance structure. The group will be responsible for examining, documenting, and proposing improvements to the policies and procedures that were used to run the project.

Closing out the long-standing requests

Last year the Rust team and community shipped many features. Their plan for this year is to step back, assess, and prepare for the future. Instead of coming up with new features, they plan to finish up the initiatives they started.

Jonathan Turner, a Rust developer, said, “Let’s finish what we started. As much as is possible and practical this year, let’s set aside new designs and ship what we’ve already designed. Let’s tackle challenges we haven’t had time to give our full attention.”

Each sub-team has made a high-level plan for themselves. The Cargo team aims to finish the “almost complete work” on custom registries. The language team plans to ship the in-progress features such as const generics, Generic Associated Types, and specialization. The Library team will be focusing on maintaining the standard library. It also plans to finish up the development of custom allocators associated with instances of collections.

Polishing features for better developer experience

The third focus area for the Rust team is to “polish” the features that make for great developer experience. In the past few years, Rust has put a lot of effort into foundational work. For instance, they massively refactored the compiler to support incremental compilation and to be better prepared for IDEs.

The team plans to improve compile times and IDE support. They plan to work on the documentation and produce “unsafe code guidelines” that explain what unsafe code can and cannot do. The WebAssembly working group will be polishing the wasm support, for example, debugging.

To know more, check out the official announcement by Rust.

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