Together for a healthier Clippy | Inside Rust Blog

July 6, 2026 &middot; blyxyas<br>on behalf of the Clippy team

Together for a healthier Clippy

Clippy is a very loved piece of software, with the fortune of having many<br>contributors willing to do high-quality pull requests with very needed features<br>and bug-fixes. We are extremely thankful for every single contributor who not<br>only took the time to learn about Clippy’s internals, but also felt comfortable<br>enough to show their work and maintained communication in order to ship it.

That’s why we’re addressing them with this health report of Clippy as an open<br>source project.

The truth is that Clippy has a reviewing capacity problem, and we’ve been having<br>it for the last few months. Unlike some other Rust teams, no one from the Clippy<br>team is currently funded to work on Clippy, not even on a part-time basis. The<br>burden of maintenance thus falls squarely into the maintainer’s free time,<br>eventually leading to burnout.

We hope that the newly established Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund will be able<br>to help secure some funding for Clippy maintainers. If you'd like to help,<br>consider donating to the fund.

That’s why we are launching an initiative in which contributors help themselves<br>get their pull request reviewed and merged faster.

What does this mean

Once a contributor opens a pull request, we propose they review another<br>contributor’s pull request. That way each contributor reviews at least one pull<br>request and nobody’s contributions get stale.

The underlying mechanism looks like this: Once a contributor opens a pull request,<br>our dear bot @rustbot will prompt them to look at other<br>pull requests (preferably ones without any other reviews). After they’ve reviewed<br>a pull request, the contributor gets on a special secret list of cool ones, and<br>priority on their pull request from the team's reviewers.

We want to thank the Bevy project and their "Open Code Review" system as an<br>inspiration for this new initiative.

We've done this in the past

Clippy is no stranger to health updates of this kind, last year we had the<br>Feature Freeze, which was an absolute success. In that process, we gained<br>knowledge, trust, and the certainty that the Rust community cared about<br>Clippy, and Clippy doing things right.

Once again, the team wants to thank and congratulate every single person,<br>contributor or not, that cares about Clippy. Striving for excellence is what<br>makes this linter (and language) so loved, and with the help of the community<br>(of YOU), we can help Clippy become stronger and healthier.