Getting Started
Thank you for your interest in contributing to Rust! There are many ways to contribute, and we appreciate all of them.
If this is your first time contributing, the walkthrough chapter can give you a good example of how a typical contribution would go.
This documentation is not intended to be comprehensive; it is meant to be a quick guide for the most useful things. For more information, see this chapter on how to build and run the compiler.
Asking Questions
If you have questions, please make a post on the Rust Zulip server or
internals.rust-lang.org. If you are contributing to Rustup, be aware they are not on
Zulip - you can ask questions in #wg-rustup
on Discord.
See the list of teams and working groups and the Community page on the
official website for more resources.
As a reminder, all contributors are expected to follow our Code of Conduct.
The compiler team (or t-compiler
) usually hangs out in Zulip in this
"stream"; it will be easiest to get questions answered there.
Please ask questions! A lot of people report feeling that they are "wasting
expert time", but nobody on t-compiler
feels this way. Contributors are
important to us.
Also, if you feel comfortable, prefer public topics, as this means others can see the questions and answers, and perhaps even integrate them back into this guide :)
Experts
Not all t-compiler
members are experts on all parts of rustc
; it's a
pretty large project. To find out who could have some expertise on
different parts of the compiler, consult triagebot assign groups.
The sections that start with [assign*
in triagebot.toml
file.
But also, feel free to ask questions even if you can't figure out who to ping.
Another way to find experts for a given part of the compiler is to see who has made recent commits.
For example, to find people who have recently worked on name resolution since the 1.68.2 release,
you could run git shortlog -n 1.68.2.. compiler/rustc_resolve/
. Ignore any commits starting with
"Rollup merge" or commits by @bors
(see CI contribution procedures for
more information about these commits).
Etiquette
We do ask that you be mindful to include as much useful information as you can in your question, but we recognize this can be hard if you are unfamiliar with contributing to Rust.
Just pinging someone without providing any context can be a bit annoying and
just create noise, so we ask that you be mindful of the fact that the
t-compiler
folks get a lot of pings in a day.
What should I work on?
The Rust project is quite large and it can be difficult to know which parts of the project need help, or are a good starting place for beginners. Here are some suggested starting places.
Easy or mentored issues
If you're looking for somewhere to start, check out the following issue search. See the Triage for an explanation of these labels. You can also try filtering the search to areas you're interested in. For example:
repo:rust-lang/rust-clippy
will only show clippy issueslabel:T-compiler
will only show issues related to the compilerlabel:A-diagnostics
will only show diagnostic issues
Not all important or beginner work has issue labels. See below for how to find work that isn't labelled.
Recurring work
Some work is too large to be done by a single person. In this case, it's common to have "Tracking issues" to co-ordinate the work between contributors. Here are some example tracking issues where it's easy to pick up work without a large time commitment:
- Rustdoc Askama Migration
- Diagnostic Translation
- Move UI tests to subdirectories
- Port run-make tests from Make to Rust
If you find more recurring work, please feel free to add it here!
Clippy issues
The Clippy project has spent a long time making its contribution process as friendly to newcomers as possible. Consider working on it first to get familiar with the process and the compiler internals.
See the Clippy contribution guide for instructions on getting started.
Diagnostic issues
Many diagnostic issues are self-contained and don't need detailed background knowledge of the compiler. You can see a list of diagnostic issues here.
Picking up abandoned pull requests
Sometimes, contributors send a pull request, but later find out that they don't have enough
time to work on it, or they simply are not interested in it anymore. Such PRs are often
eventually closed and they receive the S-inactive
label. You could try to examine some of
these PRs and pick up the work. You can find the list of such PRs here.
If the PR has been implemented in some other way in the meantime, the S-inactive
label
should be removed from it. If not, and it seems that there is still interest in the change,
you can try to rebase the pull request on top of the latest master
branch and send a new
pull request, continuing the work on the feature.
Contributing to std (standard library)
See std-dev-guide.
Contributing code to other Rust projects
There are a bunch of other projects that you can contribute to outside of the
rust-lang/rust
repo, including cargo
, miri
, rustup
, and many others.
These repos might have their own contributing guidelines and procedures. Many of them are owned by working groups. For more info, see the documentation in those repos' READMEs.
Other ways to contribute
There are a bunch of other ways you can contribute, especially if you don't
feel comfortable jumping straight into the large rust-lang/rust
codebase.
The following tasks are doable without much background knowledge but are incredibly helpful:
- Cleanup crew: find minimal reproductions of ICEs, bisect regressions, etc. This is a way of helping that saves a ton of time for others to fix an error later.
- Writing documentation: if you are feeling a bit more intrepid, you could try to read a part of the code and write doc comments for it. This will help you to learn some part of the compiler while also producing a useful artifact!
- Triaging issues: categorizing, replicating, and minimizing issues is very helpful to the Rust maintainers.
- Working groups: there are a bunch of working groups on a wide variety of rust-related things.
- Answer questions in the Get Help! channels on the Rust Discord server, on users.rust-lang.org, or on StackOverflow.
- Participate in the RFC process.
- Find a requested community library, build it, and publish it to Crates.io. Easier said than done, but very, very valuable!
Cloning and Building
See "How to build and run the compiler".
Contributor Procedures
This section has moved to the "Contribution Procedures" chapter.
Other Resources
This section has moved to the "About this guide" chapter.