✨ Bring joy to the user
Our top goal is for Rust users to be productive and empowered. We want people to love using Rust and, if they so choose, to love participating in its community.
This covers both the design of Rust itself but also the way that you interact with users. Keep in mind that the more prominent you are within the Rust community, the more that you represent Rust wherever you go, even if it's on twitter or other places that are arguably a mix of public and private space. Some important aspects of this:
- We are all beginners at something. We always keep the needs of new users in mind and try to avoid "".
At the same time:
- Rust has a lot of users with a lot of needs. Sometimes those needs are in conflict, or they seem to be, and so we have to avoid going too far in one direction.
- You have our own needs and limits too. Just because somebody has a problem doesn't mean you have to fix it. Often the right response is a polite no (or just no response at all).
Examples
Improving Rust's compiler messages
Somebody tweets about a terrible error message. It has a type that is 16K long and is completely opaque. "What a stupid language", they say.
Just right: You reply, "Oh, yeah, that message is terrible. Is the code that caused it something I can see?" You can tell they're frustrated, and that's why they're saying how stupid Rust is. Looking at the code, you realize both (a) how to fix their problem and (b) that a quick patch to the compiler would fix it. You do both. They're happy.
Responding on an issue
Someone opens an issue claiming a bug in Rust. In fact, the problem is that their code was relying on an implementation detail of a method in the standard library -- this is despite the fact that the documentation for the function clearly states that this detail may change.