🥰 Supportive: "the language, tools, and community are here to help"

We strive to make our tools polished and friendly, and we look for every opportunity to guide people towards success. Part of that is building a community that eagerly shares its knowledge in a welcoming and inclusive way.

In tension with

Making Rust feel supportive can be in tension with Rust feeling reliable. It may also be in tension with Rust feeling versatile: often the most supportive path is to offer a simple, streamlined set of choices, but that may be too limiting.

Mechanisms

What are some of the ways that we make Rust feel supportive?

Polished developer experience

The details count.

Rust tools strive to provide a polished, smooth experience for our developers. One example is how the compiler offers quality error messages that attempt to not only indicate an error, but to teach the user how the language works, and offer helpful suggestions for how to fix their code. For tools like cargo, this manifests in careful CLI design that makes the "easy things easy" (but of course, for Rust to feel versatile, we have to go beyond that).