The Rust Foundation, a foundation set up to support the development of the increasingly popular open-source Rust programming language, today announced the first recipients of awards for its inaugural Community Grants Program.

The Rust Foundation Community Grants Program is a mechanism to provide funds to the Rust development community to support their work. Financial support granted under the program assists Rust maintainers in maintaining focus on work that best demonstrates the capabilities of Rust.

Twenty individuals were selected under the program as Rust Foundation Fellows and 20 standalone grants were awarded to projects targeting specific work in the Rust ecosystem.

The Rust Fellowship award recognizes long-term contributors to the Rust Project, as well as “Associate Fellow” entrants to the maintainer community looking to increase their contributions and skills to develop into the Rust leaders of the future.

Rust Fellows receive sponsorship for one year to work on key priority Rust development, including a monthly stipend, training, networking and the opportunity to attend Rust-related events.

Some recipients include Associate Fellow Waffle Lapkin, who is working to make it easier to learn and use Rust through diagnostic improvements to the Rust compiler and contributions to the standard library. Associate Fellow Ouz-a from Turkey aims to use the award to deepen skills and experience by becoming more actively working on the Rust Compiler.

The 20 Project Grants have been awarded to individuals and organizations to work on various projects in Rust. Projects include supporting the growth of the Rust community in China, enabling and organizing existing and new Rust Project teams, developing written content from documentation to books and creating and improving Rust internals, tools and application programming interfaces.

The foundation received more than 60 applications for funding across the two grant streams. The awards represent an investment in the maintenance and development of key areas of the Rust ecosystem, which will improve and increase the tools and features available to users, will speed up bug fixes, pull requests and the production of documentation and enable more time to be devoted to governance and learning.

“The Rust community of volunteers and maintainers are key to the ongoing success and growth of the Rust language,” said Shane Miller, chair of the Rust Foundation and member director for Amazon Web Services Inc., a key contributor to the Program.

Along with AWS, Rust Foundation members include Google LLC, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Meta Inc., Microsoft Corp., Mozilla and various others.

Image: Rust Foundation