Rustls and the Rust Foundation's Rust Innovation Lab

2025-09-03 — Joe Birr-Pixton with Dirkjan Ochtman, Daniel McCarney and Josh Aas

As you may have seen, Rustls is the first project in the Rust Foundation's new Rust Innovation Lab program.

Rustls is a project I started in May 2016 as I learned Rust. Since then it has grown from a casual project, to having multiple maintainers, hundreds of contributors, funded contributions, and finally multiple funded maintainers.

As a project it has expanded to incorporate adjacent efforts, such as an OpenSSL-compatible API, a C API, deep integration into platform-specific certificate verifiers and integrations with important Rust ecosystem crates such as tokio and hyper.

Now it supports a significant amount of the crates ecosystem and applications with billions of users.

Giving the Rustls project an administrative and legal home is the next step in that development.

Users will see no change in the project's direction or personnel. If you rely on Rustls in a commercial context we would love to talk about how we can address your needs, and how we can work together to support the project long-term.

We want to thank ISRG for its significant and ongoing support, and Sovereign Tech Agency for their recent funding of the project

Q+A:

Why do this now?

We want to make it easier for potential funding sources to support the project. In conversations, it became clear that a clear legal and governance status would make the project more attractive for funders.

Why the Rust Foundation?

We feel the Rust Foundation shares our goals in promoting the Rust language and serving its users.

Does this mean Rustls is being funded by my organization's membership of the Rust Foundation?

No. Only funding specifically for Rustls will be made available to the Rustls project. This does not affect funding to the Rust Project or other initiatives funded by the Rust Foundation.

Does this change Rustls' technical direction or personnel?

It does not change that. The existing maintainers have complete and unequivocal control over the Rustls project and project roadmap.