3935-Project-Goals-2026 - The Rust RFC Book

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The Rust RFC Book

Feature Name: project_goals_2026

Start Date: 2026-02-23

RFC PR: rust-lang/rfcs#3935

Summary

Establish the initial round of Rust Project Goals for 2026 along with a set of current roadmaps, which describe multi-year development arcs.

New Rust Project Goals may be added over the course of the year but only if all required resources (champions, funding, etc) are already known.

Motivation

The 2026 goal slate consists of 66 project goals. In comparison to prior rounds, we have changed to annual goals rather than six-month goal periods. Annuals goals give us more time to discuss and organize.

Why we set goals

Goals serve multiple purposes.

For would-be contributors, goals are Rust’s front door. If you want to improve Rust - whether that’s a new language feature, better tooling, or fixing a long-standing pain point - the goal process is how you turn that idea into reality. When you propose a goal and teams accept it, you get more than approval. You get a champion from the relevant team who will mentor you, help you navigate the project, and ensure your work gets the review attention it needs. Goals are a contract: you commit to doing the work, the project commits to supporting you.

For users, goals serve as a roadmap, giving you an early picture of what work we expect to get done this year.

For Rust maintainers, goals help to surface interactions across teams. They aid in coordination because people know what work others are aiming to do and where they may need to offer support.

Goals are proposed by contributors and accepted by teams

As an open-source project, Rust’s goal process works differently than a company’s. In a company, leadership sets goals and assigns employees to execute them. Rust doesn’t have employees - we have contributors who volunteer their time and energy. So in our process, goals begin with the contributor: the person (or company) that wants to do the work.

Contributors propose goals; Rust teams accept them. When you propose a goal, you’re saying you’re prepared to invest the time to make it happen. When a team accepts, they’re committing to support that work - doing reviews, engaging in RFC discussions, and providing the guidance needed to land it in Rust.

How these goals were selected

Goal proposals were collected during the month of January. Many of the goals are continuing goals that are carried over from the previous year, but others goal are new.

In February, an alpha version of this RFC is reviewed with teams. Teams vet the goals to determine if they are realistic and to make sure that goal have champions from the team. A champion is a Rust team member that will mentor and guide the contributor as they do their work. Champions keep up with progress on the goal, help the champion figure out technical challenges, and also help the contributor to navigate the Rust team(s). Champions also field questions from others in the project who want to understand the goal.

How to follow along with a goal’s progress

Once the Goals RFC is accepted, you can follow along with the progress on a goal in a few different ways:

Each goal has a tracking issue. Goal contributors and champions are expected to post regular updates. These updates are also posted to Zulip in the #project-goals channel.

Regular blog posts cover major happenings in goals.

Guide-level explanation

There are a total of 66 planned for this year. That’s a lot! You can see the complete list, but to help you get a handle on it, we’ve selected a few to highlight. These are goals that will be stabilizing this year or which we think people will be particularly excited to learn about.

Important: You have to understand the nature of a Rust goal. Rust is an open-source project, which means that progress only happens when contributors come and make it happen. When the Rust project declares a goal, that means that (a) contributors, who we call the task owners, have said they want to do the work and (b) members of the Rust team members have promised to support them. Sometimes those task owners are volunteers, sometimes they are paid by a company, and sometimes they supported by grants. But no matter which category they are, if they ultimately are not able to do the work (say, because something else comes up that is higher priority for them in their lives), then the goal won’t happen. That’s ok, there’s always next year!

Running Rust scripts will get more convenient with cargo script

GoalWhat and why

Stabilize cargo-scriptStabilize support for “cargo script”, the ability to have a single file that contains both Rust code and a Cargo.toml.

People involved: Ed Page

“Cargo script” let’s you create a single file that specifies both a Rust program and the dependencies it...