Who are the core contributors?

community
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Please forgive my ignorance, but I am not very familiar with how programming languages are created in the sense of community. I've taken a look at the Rust Team page. I have a few questions:

Are the people on that page exclusively the folks who created Rust? Does Rust accept a lot of PRs from people not on that page? Also, are all of those people Mozilla employees or are many volunteers? It's nice to know more about the people behind this awesome language. It seems that Alex Crichton is sort of the "face" of Rust. I assume he has done much of the early work? Thanks.

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Are the people on that page exclusively the folks who created Rust?

No.

Does Rust accept a lot of PRs from people not on that page?

Yes.

Also, are all of those people Mozilla employees or are many volunteers?

Many are not Mozilla employees, and many are volunteers. (I suspect some are neither Mozilla employees nor volunteers, but unsure. For example, I was once paid by Samsung to work on Rust.)

It seems that Alex Crichton is sort of the "face" of Rust.

Is he? This is not the impression I got.

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The earliest work on the Rust language was done by its original creator, Graydon Hoare, who now works on the Swift compiler team.

There's a good talk by Steve Klabnik on the history of Rust - might be something you'd be interested in :slight_smile:

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You've already gotten some answers, but to not answer your direct questions, but some implied ones:

That list is the list of people who have decision-making power over the Rust project. That's different than the list of people who send in PRs. You can find the names of people who have contributed to each release here: https://thanks.rust-lang.org/ About 10% of the people on the team page, last I checked, are Mozilla employees.

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Ah, thank you guys for the resources! Glad I asked because I was largely mistaken.

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A lot of people suspect that Alex Crichton is just a pseudonym for an army of engineers because it's hard to imagine a single person having that kind of output :slight_smile:.

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Seriously, I was like geez this guy is on almost every team, and if you go to YouTube and type Rust he's on almost every talk.

Aaron Turon and Steve Klabnik have some great stuff as well, and I'm sure there are many others, which is why I wanted to ask this question! But Alex is definitely very visible from a newcomer's perspective. Rust is a super interesting project to me.

@vitalyd I also think you're another army of engineers because you seem to know Rust like the back of your hand and offer some of the best advice I've seen on a forum.

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I appreciate that!

We all start with zero knowledge - I suspect if one was to look at my first set of posts on this forum, when I was learning the basics, you'll see others helping me out; I'm just paying that back :slight_smile: I also feel that explaining things is a good way to assess if I myself actually understand the stuff, or if there're gaps. I also happen to really like Rust so it all works out.

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