Rust Foundation Update: January and February 2026
The Rust Foundation held its January and February 2026 meetings, marking significant progress in various areas. A new Infra Engineer, Ubiratan Soares, was hired with funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency, bringing fresh expertise to the team. The Foundation's staff attended EU Open Source Week, engaging in events such as Code & Compliance, EU OSS Awards, and FOSDEM. These interactions provided valuable opportunities for collaboration and discussion on policy changes affecting open-source projects and developers. The RustConf Call-For-Proposals was open until February 16, and sponsorship opportunities are now available on the website, which is undergoing a rebranding and will be relaunched by the end of Q1. The Foundation's engineering team made notable advancements on several projects, including the development of cargo-capslock for static and runtime capability analysis on Rust binaries. The vulnerability surfacing to crates.io RFC was officially accepted, and the security tab implementation is nearing completion. Furthermore, the team is working on migrating crates.io's frontend from EmberJS to Svelte and developing a plan for the interop initiative in 2026. This initiative aims to establish a memory-safe subset for C++ and achieve end-to-end memory safety between Rust and C++. The Infra team supported the docs-rs team in transitioning from a deprecated self-hosted monitoring solution to Datadog, enhancing reliability, security, and developer experience. The board discussed eligibility requirements for the Rust Innovation Lab and reviewed the proposed structure for an End User Group, aiming to foster a stronger relationship between industry users, the Rust Foundation, and the Project. The meetings also covered the implementation of the vulnerability surfacing tab, progress on C++ interop, and the hiring of a new contractor. For more information, the full minutes of the January and February meetings are available on the Foundation's site, and updates from the engineering team will be shared in the upcoming March meeting update.