What’s Next for the Rust Innovation Lab?

Since the announcement of the Rust Innovation Lab at RustConf last September, we’ve been working hard to onboard rustls as our inaugural project (as well as celebrating rustls being shortlisted for two OpenUK awards!) and thinking about what kinds of projects we’d like to support next.

As a reminder, the Rust Innovation Lab (RIL) is where the Rust Foundation hosts projects that fill a gap for Rust developers or serve as great examples of what Rust can achieve. We want to accept both mature and experimental projects, and as a lab, the RIL can serve as a temporary home while projects are getting started, but it can also be a place for mature projects to live permanently.

The RIL supports fully funded Rust initiatives with the structure, stewardship, and administrative backing they need to succeed—giving ambitious ideas the space and stability to grow into lasting parts of the Rust ecosystem. For example, the RIL will bring a project under the Foundation GitHub Enterprise, working with the project to ensure security best-practices. As another example, the RIL can provide marketing support for the project, utilizing the Rust Foundation’s communications and marketing team, or help find additional developers to help work on the project, if that was requested.

When we were thinking about what projects would make a compelling project in the RIL, we came up with three factors – projects that showcase Rust’s strengths, fill a gap for Rust developers, and where the RIL adds unique value. Not every project will excel on every dimension, but stronger candidates will demonstrate several of these qualities:

1. Showcases Rust’s strengths — The project demonstrates what Rust is capable of, serving as a compelling example of Rust’s value proposition. These are important, influential, or impactful Rust projects that highlight the language’s benefits.

2. Fills a gap for Rust developers — The project addresses a real need for people writing or using Rust. This could be tooling, libraries, infrastructure, specifications, or other resources that make Rust developers more productive, secure, or effective.

3. RIL adds unique value — The Rust Foundation’s connections to the Rust Project, Rust community, and Rust-focused organizations provide something the project couldn’t easily get elsewhere. The Foundation’s experience with Rust and its ecosystem is a genuine asset to the project.

It’s important that we don’t just support the obvious projects that fill a gap for Rust developers, like developer tooling, but that we also support projects that help advance Rust’s future in important industries and domains, or whose value might not be obvious if you don’t understand the broader dynamics of the Rust ecosystem.

Success will look different for every project in the RIL. Some projects will mature and spin-out into independent, self-sustaining efforts; others will continue to live and grow within the Lab; still others will pivot, pause, conclude, or return later to the RIL in a different form. We see this as a sign of a healthy lab. We’re committed to giving every project the support it needs to learn quickly, adapt thoughtfully, and have the best possible chance of success, whatever that looks like.

rustls is unsurprisingly a great example of a project that meets these criteria:

1. Showcases Rust’s strengths — As a memory-safe TLS implementation, rustls is an amazing demonstration of what Rust can do
   
2. Fills a gap for Rust developers — rustls is an important building block for a modern and safe system; is being deployed in production today in important widely-used projects; and helps Rust gain a foothold in important domains!
   
3. RIL adds unique value — Our expertise in the Rust ecosystem can help rustls attract funding from other organisations that care about memory safety and improving the security of software

You can find the full eligibility criteria for the RIL on our GitHub repository. If you maintain a project that you think would be a good fit, apply!