May 15 2025
It’s kind of hard to believe it’s been ten years since Rust 1.0 was released.
I stopped working on Rust three years ago, and frankly, the last three years have been pretty rough. But 2025 is shaping up to be a really good year for me, with lots of positive changes.
With that in mind, this post is going to be a bit of a different one than you might expect. For a fantastic post that’s a bit more traditional, check out what Graydon wrote for the Rust Foundation: 10 years of stable Rust: an infrastructure story. It’s fantastic, of course.
I’d instead like to reflect a bit on a comment I saw on the internet the other day:
[Rust is] not a great hobby language but it is a fantastic professional language, precisely because of the ease of refactors and speed of development that comes with the type system and borrow checker.
Patrick Walton, one of the earliest contributors to Rust, had this to say:
I never thought I’d live to see the day when someone would say this. The first 5 years of Rust were all “this is interesting for hobby projects but nobody will ever adopt this in industry”.
The release of Rust 1.0 was great, but it was also stressful. The few years before Rust 1.0 were marked by a deep, deep anxiety among the team. I’m sure someone else who was around back then will disagree with me, but that’s my recollection. It may not have always been overt, but it was there. A large question was looming over us: would anyone actually use this thing? Would it become a hobbyist language, or would it be something that people actually used in production?
At this point, we now know the answer: yes, Rust is used a lot. It’s used for real, critical projects to do actual work by some of the largest companies in our industry. We did good.
The release of 1.0 was the start of that journey in earnest. It was time to stop changing things all the time, and to start focusing on stability. It was time to gain more users, and to fix the issues that they found. We had to start shipping stable releases, and we had to start doing it on a regular basis. We had to start doing all of the things that a real programming language does.
Over the last ten years, a lot changed. It wasn’t easy, and it took a lot of blood, sweat, and many, many tears. But we did it. We built a real programming language, and we built a real community around it.
Rust is very much not perfect. There’s more work to be done, and arguably, someone out there should probably be starting a language that will someday eat Rust’s lunch.
But ten years ago, we were pushing a button and praying that it would all work out. And now, ten years later, I’m doing this:
❯ rustup update stable
info: syncing channel updates for 'stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu'
info: latest update on 2025-05-15, rust version 1.87.0 (17067e9ac 2025-05-09)
info: downloading component 'rust-src'
info: downloading component 'cargo'
info: downloading component 'clippy'
info: downloading component 'rust-docs'
info: downloading component 'rust-std'
info: downloading component 'rustc'
info: downloading component 'rustfmt'
info: removing previous version of component 'rust-src'
info: removing previous version of component 'cargo'
info: removing previous version of component 'clippy'
info: removing previous version of component 'rust-docs'
info: removing previous version of component 'rust-std'
info: removing previous version of component 'rustc'
info: removing previous version of component 'rustfmt'
info: installing component 'rust-src'
info: installing component 'cargo'
info: installing component 'clippy'
info: installing component 'rust-docs'
19.9 MiB / 19.9 MiB (100 %) 16.3 MiB/s in 1s ETA: 0s
info: installing component 'rust-std'
29.4 MiB / 29.4 MiB (100 %) 22.2 MiB/s in 1s ETA: 0s
info: installing component 'rustc'
76.3 MiB / 76.3 MiB (100 %) 23.9 MiB/s in 3s ETA: 0s
info: installing component 'rustfmt'
stable-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu updated - rustc 1.87.0 (17067e9ac 2025-05-09) (from rustc 1.86.0 (05f9846f8 2025-03-31))and then going about my day. It is a rare privilege to be able to spend ten years building a tool you want to use, and then be able to spend your time at work using it. I am grateful to have had that opportunity, and I hope that everyone else who has worked on Rust over the years feels the same way.
Here’s my post about this post on BlueSky:
#rustlang 1.0, ten years later steveklabnik.com/writing/rust...