The Rust community is growing. And the rate of that growth is accelerating.

User growth means accepting people that haven’t been exposed to Rust’s norms yet. Let’s not fracture because of an argument over top-posting vs bottom-quoting or something equally trivial.

We need to make sure that Rust is prepared to welcome people who are just learning about Rust today. We don’t want anyone to feel like they’re late to the party.

So far, our community infrastructure and governance has been quite scalable but I expect that we’ll see some things break down if our growth continues to accelerate. Something brittle will be exposed: probably in the form of volunteer burnout. Our community norms should be stable, yet supple.

A lesson from Wikipedia is that sustained community growth is not guaranteed. Being welcoming to newcomers is essential for the health of the entire project.

As Rust grows, its personality will change.

We’re nearing a time when someone will learn Rust as their first programming language. It’s probable that’s already happened. That’s quite a big step in terms of the language’s development. It means that we have, or will have, Rust programmers with no prior domain knowledge. At the moment, Rust is a melting pot of good ideas from dozens of other domains. That will change.

As Rust matures, it becomes boring. It won’t be attractive to programmers who are exploring new intellectual territory. We’ll loose the first wave of Rust developers. The next wave of programming languages will pull them away.

The time is also coming when the suits will arrive. As Rust continues towards the mainstream, it will happen. Let’s make sure that we’re mentally prepared for that. Hostility is toxic.

Rust presents an opportunity to teach the worldwide software industry how to build software. Security vulnerabilities caused from memory leaks should be seen as negligence, not just a nuisance. That future will only be possible if Rust continues to grow. Let’s not bite the newbie.