The History of Rust

Rust began in 2006 as a personal project by Graydon Hoare, a Mozilla employee experimenting with safer ways to write low-level software. Mozilla officially started sponsoring the project in 2009, and Rust was announced publicly for the first time in 2010, giving outside developers their first real look at it.

In its early years, the rustc compiler was itself written in OCaml. Around 2011, the team rewrote the compiler in Rust itself — a milestone called self-hosting, where a language's own compiler is written in that same language. Reaching self-hosting is often treated as a rite of passage that shows a young language is mature enough to build real software with.

Rust's first stable release, version ____, arrived in May 2015 along with a promise of stability without stagnation.

The name 'Rust' is generally credited to rust fungi, a family of fungi noted for being extremely hardy and difficult to eradicate — a fitting namesake for a language obsessed with reliability. It's also a short, memorable word that pairs naturally with Cargo, Rust's package manager and build tool, named after the cargo a ship carries.

Why is the language named 'Rust'?

Rust's development is now guided by editions — Rust 2015, 2018, 2021, and 2024 — which let the language add new features and even change some syntax rules without breaking code written for an older edition. In 2021, the independent Rust Foundation was created to steward the language's future, with founding corporate members including AWS, Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Mozilla, after Mozilla scaled back its own involvement in the project.

The Rust Foundation was created in 2021 to help govern the language's future after Mozilla scaled back its involvement.