Community & Contributing

Contributing to Rust

For the final project (or for fun!) you’re allowed to contribute to the Rust language project, or to several other Rust projects.
Read the contributing guide here to get started.
Also check out the issue tracker.
- There are 2,288 issues open as of time of writing!
- Filter by E-Easy, E-Medium, or E-Mentor to find good starting issues.

There are three(ish) main parts of the Rust project:
- rustc, the Rust compiler
- libstd, the Rust standard library
- documentation
If you want to contribute to core rustc, beware that you may find it very difficult!
There’s no real distinction between rustc & libstd in the issue tracker, but it’s usually pretty obvious what an issue is about.
If you wish to contribute to Rust for the final project, don’t only work on documentation.

If you wish to contribute, make sure you also read and follow Rust’s Code of Conduct.
Be polite. Be organized. Don’t create unnecessary work for other people. Test your code well. Use GitHub properly (issues and pull requests).

When you want to work on a feature, start by forking the Rust repo on Github.
When you’ve completed whatever feature you’re working on, make a pull request from your fork against the main Rust repo, and await review.
You’ll be assigned a reviewer by bors, the Rust bot.
Your reviewer may ask you to make changes, provide more tests, etc. to your code.
Once review is complete, your changes will be “rolled up” by bors into a changeset and merged into master when appropriate.

If you want to propose a larger feature for Rust, Cargo, or Crates.io, you should create an RFC, or Request For Comments.
- e.g. semantic/syntactic changes, additions to std, removing language features…
Before you submit an RFC, you may want to discuss it on the Rust internals forum, IRC, etc. and talk to the core team about it first.
- This is suggested to help you flesh out ideas & make sure an RFC won’t get rejected outright.
If you think your idea is still worth proposing, write a formal RFC using the template on the RFCs repo, following the process here.