Rust 2020: Funding
👋 This page was last updated ~7 years ago. Just so you know.
Blog posts that praise Rust are many but funding is generally in short supply.
If even a small percentage of the money Rust saves companies was put back into the ecosystem it would help secure the future of the platform tremendously.
Multiple sources of funding
It is unreasonable going forward to expect the same handful of companies to provide all the funding.
Although Rust was born (or so I’m told) at Mozilla, it seems pretty clear that it has outgrown it significantly, and many big companies now benefit from Rust.
I hope they not only contribute code in the future but also funding.
Funding even if you don’t ask for it
Projects like rust-analyzer cost money, they explained in great
detail. Those
should be funded.
Other projects have not explained it in great detail but nevertheless could use funding as well.
There are many people good at what they do but not especially good at getting funding. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get funding.
Goodwill does not pay the rent
If we want the wonderful folks who have been improving all aspects of the compiler, various libraries, infrastructure, docs, and I’m forgetting many, to stay and be happy and not burn out and leave for high-paying jobs, we need funding.
Being well-compensated (or even compensated at all) for work on open-source projects, does not make the work any less noble or open source.
Funding
Thanks for funding.
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A dynamic linker murder mystery
I write a ton of articles about rust. And in those articles, the main focus is about writing Rust code that compiles. Once it compiles, well, we’re basically in the clear! Especially if it compiles to a single executable, that’s made up entirely of Rust code.
That works great for short tutorials, or one-off explorations.
Unfortunately, “in the real world”, our code often has to share the stage with other code. And Rust is great at that. Compiling Go code to a static library, for example, is relatively finnicky. It insists on being built with GCC (and no other compiler), and linked with GNU ld (and no other linker).