Giving Back to Rust
By Alex Band and Arya K.
NLnet Labs has wholeheartedly adopted the Rust programming language; for the last six years, every new NLnet Labs project has been written in Rust. Rust helps us write code that is reliable, concise, and efficient. Its type system lets us design expressive, granular APIs through which we can encode important invariants easily. We love interacting with its vibrant community, and you'll find us at RustWeek every year. Our goal is to write mission-critical software to give back to the community, and Rust helps us do that. Now it's time to give back to Rust.
The Rust project makes for a fascinating case study in open-source development and funding. Rust was born at Mozilla and received attention from its developers for many years. Over time, other companies became interested; since Rust was still a young language, their developers ended up contributing to it too. But around 2020, many of these contributors were laid off as part of wider restructurings. Developers found it harder to justify spending company time contributing to Rust, since their efforts didn't fit into corporate planning structures. Rust began seeing a lot more contributions from people working in their free time; this led to large waves of burnout that seriously affected the project. Since last year, RustNL (the non-profit behind RustWeek) and The Rust Foundation have launched initiatives to fund key maintainers, but they have limited resources and the vast majority of Rust contributors continue working in their free time.
Arya joined our team in 2024 to work on our Rust-based DNS projects; she's driving an overhaul of the domain library API and is a core member of the Cascade team. She fell in love with Rust long before she joined us, and given that her favorite pastime is optimization, her transition from writing fast Rust code into compiling Rust code faster was no surprise. While she's a huge fan of SIMD and low-level optimizations, she became obsessed with optimizing the Rust compiler for the opposite reason: she's looking for large-scale, architectural ways to unlock better performance. A year ago, she started writing a Rust compiler from scratch in her free time: Krabby, a playground where she could explore the impacts of a radically different compiler architecture. You can catch her giving a talk about Krabby in Barcelona at EuroRust 2026.
What better way to give back to Rust than to give her the space to explore this project? From July 22, Arya will spend one day a week, as part of her time at NLnet Labs, working on the Rust compiler. This is a collaboration with RustNL — she will work under the guidance of their maintainers to map out her work and connect to other rustc contributors. Currently, she's optimizing rustc's processing of declarative macros (#158577, #158974, #158976). She's going to work through rustc, component by component, optimizing what she can and finding architectural changes to experiment with in Krabby. You can read more about her plan on her blog. We're incredibly proud of her efforts, and we're so happy to give back to the Rust community!