I say this neutrally: from an outsider that has used a number of different languages and ecosystems, the Rust community seems markedly different in their mixing of software development and social causes.
To understand your message better, what makes Rust “markedly different” here, specifically?
I don’t mean it in any kind of derogatory way if that’s what you’re asking. The community itself is quite new compared to, say, the C++ community and baked a lot of values and governance into the project very early on. The fact that they do surveys like https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/03/02/2025-State-Of-Rust-Survey-results/ and explicitly include metrics on different marginalized groups speaks to the fact that their objective isn’t just “make a memory-safe programming language” but to include community, inclusivity, and ethics into the core of the organization.
Other large projects are starting to do that too, but it’s usually more of a bolt-on / slow shift affair rather than having baked those values into the core from the beginning.
To understand your message better, what makes Rust “markedly different” here, specifically?
score 1 · canonical
I don’t mean it in any kind of derogatory way if that’s what you’re asking. The community itself is quite new compared to, say, the C++ community and baked a lot of values and governance into the project very early on. The fact that they do surveys like https://blog.rust-lang.org/2026/03/02/2025-State-Of-Rust-Survey-results/ and explicitly include metrics on different marginalized groups speaks to the fact that their objective isn’t just “make a memory-safe programming language” but to include community, inclusivity, and ethics into the core of the organization.
Other large projects are starting to do that too, but it’s usually more of a bolt-on / slow shift affair rather than having baked those values into the core from the beginning.
score 1 · canonical