Deeper into Rust

Another one of Rust's strong points is its thriving community. Many users actively participate in their local community (by going to or organizing meetups) or online via working groups, the IRC/Discord channel, or the official forum. The most important online resources are as follows:

• The main website with pointers to various resources: https://www.rust-lang.org
• The Rust user forum: https://users.rust-lang.org
• The official Twitter account: https://twitter.com/rustlang
• A collection of IRC channels at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Rust
• Rust's official blog: https://blog.rust-lang.org
• The Rust Book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

Other than that, users have created additional content, such as podcasts, blogs, and various tools and libraries. The most impressive user contributions, however, can be found in the core language!

Rust's official GitHub repository at https://github.com/rust-lang holds the source code for many of the resources (for example, the website, blog, book, and documentation), and contributions are very welcome.

Mozilla has an impressive record of creating and fostering open source communities, and Rust is no different. As active members of these communities, we encourage everyone to take part and help make Rust the most enjoyable and useful language around!

Requests for Comments (RFCs)

Due to the open source nature of Rust, there are some governance rules in place to maintain stable and flexible interfaces, yet encourage change and discussion as the language evolves.

For something as sensitive as a programming language and its standard library, a more rigid process than the regular pull request approval is required to have deeper discussions. Imagine the impact of changing a single keyword and how many projects would stop working immediately!

This is where RFCs come in. They provide a way for all stakeholders to contribute to the discussion with an equal chance to comment. A typical workflow for integrating change in open source projects uses the fork and pull method where the contributor creates a pull request (PR) to propose changes (https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-requests/). Unlike in the RFC process, this gets hard to manage in larger code bases and only starts the discussion after a solution has been proposed, narrowing the focus considerably.

A repository of active and past RFCs can be found here: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs.