Showcasing Rust in production; are you using Rust in production?

Greetings.

We're all into Rust and want to see it succeed. A number of exciting things have happened in Rust in the last year, and one of the best is that there are now real people running real Rust code in real production scenarios. It's all very real!

This is something we like talking about as much as we can, and we encourage people running Rust to talk about their experiences with it publicly. Together we can make Rust great, right?

Now that there are a handful of well-known parties running Rust in production we've put together a page on the website to brag about them, "Friends of Rust". It includes logos of organizations, and a blurb about what they are doing with Rust. Some even include links to further information for the prospective hacker to read about how Rust is being applied to real-world problems. So this should be good promotion for both Rust and those using and talking about Rust.

The page is linked from the FAQ, and will eventually be linked more prominently once it's grown a bit, possibly in conjunction with a website redesign.

It already includes several organizations who have generously agreed to let us use their logos to get the page started, but it needs to keep growing.

If your organization is using Rust in production, we implore you to add your information to this page. To do so fill out this form on the issue tracker, and we'll take it from there!

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As to what "production" means, that is necessarily fuzzy. We need to be generous enough in our interpretation that people are confident submitting their logos and the page can grow, but also selective enough that we don't put every OSS project in Rust here and dilute the marketing value of the page. Some examples of what I might consider "production users": legally-registered companies using Rust; high-profile open source products with significant production users of their own; projects where Rust code is exposed to the internet; universities teaching Rust; funded Rust-oriented research programs.

A real simple metric is "is somebody betting money on Rust"? That gives people confidence in Rust and is worth talking about, though I don't think it's necessary for money to be involved to be on this page.

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I’m not even a Rust user, but could I suggest that this page be changed to always display the text with full (or at least RGAA-compliant) opacity? It would be more accessible and easier to read.

In the current page the opacity:0 text cannot be shown for keyboard users. There is also little indication that there is text to show there.

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Oh, wow. I didn't even realize there was such text until you pointed it out, then I went back and tried hovering over the logos. Yeah, those should always be shown, or listed below to give more details, or something of the sort, otherwise I expect most people to miss them.

Or maybe the subtitle text could be "(hover logos to learn more about Rust in production)"

Jonathan

I agree they're risking money to some degree, but calling it "production" use is a stretch. A higher bar might be "risking money that if lost would severely risk financial ruin". Keep up the good work, though. I love Rust's attention to memory and thread safety (being a C++ programmer I can appreciate that) ;-).

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When I tried this earlier the page looked pretty cluttered, and an informal poll showed people preferred not to see it all at once. The main impression we want people to get when seeing the page is 'look at all those logos - people are relying on rust'.

There may be ways to show it all at the same time while deemphasizing all the text, like e.g. lightening the color from dark black.

The hover behavior is also problematic on mobile, so I'm curious about other solutions that both maintain the relative simplicity and 'lightness' of the page but also make the text discoverable on all form-factors.

Yes. I do think such cases are worth showcasing though because they demonstrate traction in some domain.

On mobile (at least, my phone and Firefox's responsive mode), the logos end up in a single column, so displaying text unconditionally for that may not be too cluttered.

Here's a patch to clean things up a bit. It removes the text on mouseout, and displays the text always on mobile.

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