AWS’s Shane Miller to head the newly created Rust Foundation

Sources tell ZDNet that the Rust Foundation will announce on April 12 that Shane Miller, Amazon Web Services (AWS) senior engineering manager, has been elected the first chairperson of the newly created Rust Foundation. Miller confirmed she’d been “elected chair of the Rust Foundation by the board of directors in our March 9th meeting.”

Miller, who leads the Rust Platform team for AWS, has been a software engineer for almost 30 years. At AWS, Miller has been a leader in open-source strategic initiatives and software engineering and delivery. Miller’s Rust Platform team includes Rust language and compiler maintainers and contributors and developers on the Tokio runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. Under Miller’s leadership, the AWS Rust team is crafting optimizations and tools for the features that engineers will use to build and operate services which take full advantage of Rust’s performance and safety. 

In the Foundation position, Miller will further the Foundation’s mission to empower Rust maintainers to do their best work, and strive to eliminate maintainer out-of-pocket costs for compute, storage, and productivity tools. The shared goal for the Rust Foundation is to build an organization that makes Rust truly accessible — by providing access to resources like leadership and communication training that can help Rust maintainers grow themselves and their teams. Its aim is to make the community inclusive and welcome to all—including those who may be new to open-source projects. 

“Together, with the Rust community of developers,” Miller said, “we can work to achieve advancements such as faster performance, greater sustainability, and a more diverse and inclusive engineering community.” 

The Rust Foundation has brought together AWS, Google, Huawei, and Microsoft, along with Mozilla — Rust’s original corporate sponsor — to steward Rust’s development. The Rust Foundation’s founding members represent a two-year commitment to a more than $1 million annual budget to develop services, programs, and events that support the volunteer work of Rust maintainers. 

Rust has become increasingly popular as a safer alternative to C and C++ for system development. It’s become one of the most favored languages for system development. Rust is even being used now in the Linux operating system. 

While Mozilla has backed off supporting Rust, it’s found new homes with many other companies. Google, for example, is backing its use in the Apache HTTP web server project and Rust can now be used in Android as well.  At the same time, Microsoft is considering replacing some components of Windows written in C/C++ with Rust and developing Azure cloud components in Rust.

Under Miller and the new Foundation, Rust, –already well on its way to becoming a systems essential language — can only grow ever stronger.