Trio of Rust Core Team members take their leave

To lose an entire Moderation Team might be considered bad luck. But three of the Core Team?

There is only drama in the open source community when the day has a "y" in it, and sure enough a trio of members have decided to step back from the Rust Core Team, including a nine-year veteran of the language.

It has been a busy few months for the Rust project. The entire moderation team quit in November 2021. The resignation was, according to the post in GitHub on the matter, "in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves."

This week has kicked off with three of Core Team taking their leave. Florian Gilcher, a Core Team observer and project director on the Rust foundation board, is departing to focus on his company.

Pietro Albini, meanwhile, reckoned he had too much to do, and is off to "focus on other parts of the project."

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Steve Klabnik (author of the Rust Programming Language Book, along with Carol Nichols) is departing "to focus on using Rust instead of making Rust."

Klabnik was also responsible for the @rustlang Twitter account.

Klabnik recently joined Oxide, a server-maker due to ship its first hardware "with the software baked in" in the coming months. Gilcher has been CEO of Asquera for the last 10 years as well as managing director for just over three years of the amusingly named Ferrous Systems (an agency focused on solutions based on Rust).

A spokesperson told The Register that the decision of the trio to step back was not related to the resignation of the Moderation Team last year. The latter watered down its comments a little during December, retracting its suggestion that any future moderation team "exercise extreme skepticism of any statements by the Core Team" while leaving its original complaint regarding accountability in place.

The Rust language has been rising in popularity over the years. It continues to top the charts in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey as "Most Loved" technology (even if the likes of JavaScript far outstrip it in terms of commonly used) and has fans among the tech giants.

Founding members of the Rust Foundation (kicked off in 2021) include Microsoft, Google and AWS. ®