Rust's 'Vision Doc' Makes Recommendations to Help Keep Rust Growing

The team authoring the Rust 2025 Vision Doc interviewed Rust developers to find out what they liked about the language — and have now issued three recommendations 'to help Rust continue to scale across domains and usage levels.'

— Enumerate and describe Rust's design goals and integrate them into our processes, helping to ensure they are observed by future language designers and the broader ecosystem.
— Double down on extensibility, introducing the ability for crates to influence the develop experience and the compilation pipeline.
— Help users to navigate the crates.io ecosystem and enable smoother interop

The real 'empowering magic' of Rust arises from achieving a number of different attributes all at once — reliability, efficiency, low-level control, supportiveness, and so forth. It would be valuable to have a canonical list of those values that we could collectively refer to as a community and that we could use when evaluating RFCs or other proposed designs... We recommend creating an RFC that defines the goals we are shooting for as we work on Rust... One insight from our research is that we don't need to define which values are 'most important'. We've seen that for Rust to truly work, it must achieveallthe factors at once...

We recommenddoubling down on extensibilityas a core strategy. Rust's extensibility — traits, macros, operator overloading — has been key to its versatility. But that extensibility is currently concentrated in certain areas: the type system and early-stage proc macros. We should expand it to coversupportive interfaces(better diagnostics and guidance from crates) andcompilation workflow(letting crates integrate at more stages of the build process)... Doubling down on extensibility will not only make current Rust easier to use, it will enable and support Rust's use in new domains. Safety Critical applications in particular require a host of custom lints and tooling to support the associated standards. Compiler extensibility allows Rust to support those niche needs in a more general way.

We recommend finding ways to help users navigate the crates.io ecosystem... [F]inding which crates to use presents a real obstacle when people are getting started. The Rust org maintains a carefully neutral stance, which is good, but also means that people don't have anywhere to go for advice on a good 'starter set' crates... Part of the solution is enabling better interop between libraries.

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