Rust Vision Document

[nikomatsakis]

Metadata
Point of contact	@nikomatsakis
Team(s)	leadership-council
Goal document	2025h1/rust-vision-doc

Summary

Present a first draft of a "Rust Vision Doc" at the Rust All Hands in May.

The Rust Vision Doc will summarize the state of Rust adoption -- where is Rust adding value? what works well? what doesn't? -- based on conversations with individual Rust users from different communities, major Rust projects, and companies large and small that are adopting Rust. It will use that raw data to make recommendations on what problems Rust should be attacking and what constraints we should be trying to meet. The document will not include specific features or recommendations, which ought to be legislated through RFCs.

Tasks and status

• Select support team members (@nikomatsakis)
• Miscellaneous (leadership-council )
• Gathering of status quo stories ()
• Prepare draft of RFC to be presented at Rust all hands ()

[nikomatsakis]

This issue is intended for status updates only.

For general questions or comments, please contact the owner(s) directly.

[nikomatsakis]

Update so far: I put out a call for volunteers on Zulip (hackmd) and a number of folks responded. We had an initial meeting on Jan 30 (notes here). We have created a Zulip stream for this project goal (vision-doc-2025) and I also did some experimenting in the https://github.com/nikomatsakis/farsight repository for what the table of contents might look like.

Next milestone is to layout a plan. We are somewhat behind schedule but not impossibly so!

[nikomatsakis]

Update:

I've asked @jackh726 to co-lead the team with me. Together we pulled together a Rust Vision Doc action plan.

The plan begins by posting a blog post (draft available here) announcing the effort. We are coordinating with the Foundation to create a survey which will be linked from the blog post. The survey questions ask about user's experience but also look for volunteers we can speak with.

We are pulling together the team that will perform the interviewing. We've been in touch with UX reseearchers who will brief us on some of the basics of UX research. We're finalizing team membership now plus the set of focus areas, we expect to cover at least users/companies, Rust project maintainers, and Rust global communities. See the Rust Vision Doc action plan for more details.

[nikomatsakis]

TL;DR:

• We drafted a Rust Vision Doc Action Plan.
• We expect to publish our announcement blog post by end of Month including a survey requesting volunteers to speak with us. We are also creating plans for interviews with company contacts, global community groups, and Rust maintainers.