Q4 2024 Recap from Rebecca Rumbul
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2024 was an exciting and momentous year for the Rust Foundation. As you have read from previous quarterly updates, our team has remained busy throughout each season of last year and Q4 was no different.
As always, my goal in sharing these quarterly Rust Foundation staff team updates is to give our community deeper insight into the inner workings of the Foundation and provide a sense of how we prioritize our various packages of work. Though 2025 is already underway, I hope this look back at Q4 2024 at the Rust Foundation is valuable and sheds light on recent milestones, like our newly published 2024 Annual Report, the launch of our new website, our most recent Fellowship awards, and much more.
Summary
During the fourth quarter of 2024, the Rust Foundation achieved several significant milestones. We continued to advance the Safety Critical Consortium, welcomed two new members, and finalised updates to the Rust Trademark Policy. Notable progress was made in software supply chain engineering, including developments in crate provenance tracking and agreement on The Update Framework (TUF) for crate signing and mirroring.
Our staff continued to travel to Rust and open source-focused events through the end of the year. This included speaking engagements at EuroRust and the Linux Members Summit. We also published our C++/Rust Interop problem statement and strategy, marking a big step forward in our interoperability initiatives.
The quarter concluded with several significant achievements, including:
- The successful onboarding of our 2024-25 Fellows
- Receipt of funding for our Security Initiative from Alpha-Omega for 2025
- Collaboration with AWS to verify Rust standard libraries.
In October, our team participated in our first official company offsite in Reykjavik, Iceland where we spent time discussing important priorities for 2025, workshopped internal processes, shared pain-points and wins over the past year. It was a productive and valuable experience and set us up for a productive year
HR & Administration
We made good HR and admin progress in the fourth quarter. As mentioned, in October, our staff convened in Iceland for a week-long offsite, focusing on strategic planning and team cohesion. The week proved to be highly productive, leading to plans for a similar gathering in October 2025.
During this quarter, we also completed annual reviews for all staff members and discussed our capacity needs for 2025. As the year progresses, we will continue to keep a close eye on potential opportunities for growth within our current funding framework.
Finance & Legal
For detailed financial information and progress throughout the year including Q4, please see our comprehensive 2024 Annual Report.
Technology & Infrastructure
The Technology team made substantial progress across multiple initiatives in Q4. Infrastructure Engineer Marco Ieni led efforts to reduce CI costs by approximately 50% by replacing large GitHub runners with free GitHub runners. These improvements came through technical optimizations, including build reordering and CI runner migration, all while maintaining minimal impact on Rust maintainers and community workflows.
Software Developers Tobias Bieniek and Adam Harvey added several improvements to crates.io throughout the quarter. They implemented publication notifications with opt-out functionality, enabling crate owners to catch unauthorised publications. They also completed the async/await migration of the codebase, enabling performance improvements through PostgreSQL query pipelining. The team made progress on implementing the Crate deletion RFC, carefully considering name re-registration and version tracking requirements. Through the development of specialized SQL scripts, they identified dormant and spam crates, successfully recovering over 500 reserved package names after careful review. Work also progressed on a crates.io admin backend, particularly focusing on account locking and unlocking capabilities.
The Trusted Publishing RFC for crates.io successfully passed the final comment period (FCP) and was accepted by the crates.io team. The team also began developing comprehensive API documentation automatically generated from endpoint code.
We reached several important security and funding milestones this quarter. The Foundation received a generous $430,000 in funding for our Security Initiative from Alpha-Omega for 2025, marking our third consecutive year of support as a “Critical Open Source Software Project.” Security Engineer Walter Pearce, working alongside Rust Project members, led the creation of a 2025H1 Rust Project goal around crate signing, building on the TUF RFC. This initiative includes the development of preliminary infrastructure for cryptographic verification of the crates.io repository and experimental mirrors, incorporating a chain-of-trust implementation.
In Q4, we also saw progress on our Rust-C++ Interoperability Initiative. Under Jon Bauman’s leadership, we published the C++/Rust Interop problem statement and strategy, which received positive community feedback. The Foundation joined INCITS to participate directly in the ISO C++ standardisation process and collaborated with Tyler Mandry on a proposed 2025H1 Project Goal for seamless C++/Rust interoperability.
The Safety-Critical Rust Consortium continued to progress with its two primary subcommittees: coding guidelines and tooling. Plans are now in place for the second full meeting of the Consortium, scheduled for 19 February 2025, to coincide with Rust Nation.
Community Grants Program
After announcing our 2024 Fellows, we distributed four additional $20,000 financial awards to maintainers from the 2024 applicant group. The team also began working with the Leadership Council to finalise the best approach for providing financial support to Project members wishing to travel to the All-Hands in May 2025.
Communications, Marketing & Events
Our communications team focused on several key priorities in Q4, including strategic team planning for 2025 and creating the 2024 Annual Report, published on Thursday, January 16th. A major milestone was the completion and launch of the new Rust Foundation website last week! The website migration from foundation.rust-lang.org to rustfoundation.org introduces automatic redirects, updated Foundation brand elements, and an enhanced visitor experience. These updates are part of our ongoing efforts to create a more streamlined and professional platform for our community.
In addition to the focus in Q4 on preparing for our website launch, our team published several notable announcements, including our 2024 Fellowship recipients, three new associate-level members, updates to the Rust Trademark policy, the C++/Rust interoperability problem statement, new Project Director Carol Nichols joining the board, and an AWS contest for verifying Rust standard libraries.
In November, Global Rust Community Coordinator Ernest Kissiedu received an OpenUK Award— a testament to his commitment to the Rust community and global access to open source.
The Foundation received 16 media mentions across industry outlets, with coverage in InfoWorld, Techzine, and The New Stack. Our staff actively participated in key events, including EuroRust in Vienna and the Linux Members Summit in Napa.
Global Community Update
I’m pleased to include this new section in my quarterly reports, which will provide an update on the Foundation’s outreach efforts to Rust communities around the world. We believe that it is critical for the Foundation to communicate regularly with Rust user groups all over the world, not just in the regions that are traditionally resourced by the tech industry. All throughout 2024, we worked with Global Community Coordinator, Ernest Kissiedu on this focus and we are pleased to continue collaborating with him in 2025.
This quarter, the global Rust community continued to grow, with several new regional communities forming. A significant milestone was the establishment of the Rust Africa Association, facilitated by Ernest and supported by a Rust Foundation Event Support Grant. This new association serves as an umbrella organization, connecting Rust communities across the African continent. Rust South Africa celebrated its first meetup since the start of the pandemic, and Rust Kenya hosted a successful gathering supported by the Foundation’s Event Support Grant. In Q4, we also enjoyed seeing the launch of the Rust Cameroon community, further expanding Rust’s presence across the African continent.
Through support from The Rust Foundation’s Community Grant, Rust Ukraine continued to make progress in education and community building, successfully completing their Summer Rustcamp 2024 and launching their Winter Rustcamp 2025. The program has seen good engagement at Ukrainian universities, particularly with the expansion of Rust programming courses at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
As always, I hope this information gives our community insight into where the Foundation’s resources and efforts were channelled over the past several months. If you have any questions about the contents of this report, don’t hesitate to contact us at contact@rustfoundation.org.
If you are interested in joining the Rust Foundation as a member, please email us at membership@rustfoundation.org.
You can find past Rust Foundation Quarterly Updates here.
