Facebook Joins the Rust Foundation

Facebook Open Source is excited to announce our support of Rust Foundation at its highest member tier. Alongside the other fellow foundation members, Facebook is committed to sustaining and growing the Rust open source ecosystem and community.

“Facebook has embraced Rust since 2016 and utilizes it in all aspects of development, from source control to compilers,” says Joel Marcey, Open Source ecosystem lead at Facebook, and now board director at the Rust Foundation. “We are joining the Rust Foundation to help contribute to, improve and grow this language that has become so valuable to us and developers around the world. We look forward to participating with the other foundation members and the Rust community to make Rust a mainstream language of choice for systems programming and beyond.”

“Facebook has been a strong supporter of Rust for a while now - I remember first meeting them at a Rust Belt Rust conference in 2017,” says Ashley Williams, Interim Executive Director of the Rust Foundation. “I’m incredibly excited to have them join, and to have Joel serve as its board representative. His experience is broad and varied in ways that are incredibly relevant to Rust right now, from standards bodies to documentation frameworks. I think his perspective will be incredibly valuable as the Foundation fulfills its mission to support the Rust maintainers.”

Facebook is stepping up its internal developer support for Rust in 2021. In addition to the different teams throughout the company writing Rust code, there is now a dedicated Rust team that is primarily responsible for the growth of Rust development inside the company, open source contributions to Rust and Rust-based projects, and engagement with the Rust community.

“When I joined Facebook, I was amazed at how much use Rust was getting throughout the stack,” says Patrick Walton, a Rust team lead at Facebook and long-term Rust contributor. “I'm really excited to see us take our contributions to the language to the next level. Joining the Rust Foundation is a great step that signals a commitment to improve the language and ecosystem for years to come.”

Joining the Rust Foundation strengthens Facebook’s commitment to support the sustainable development of open source technologies and developer communities.