Rust core team alumni
There doesn’t seem to be a complete record of who was on individual teams in the Rust project, with past members historically being recorded simply as Rust team alumni. So I’ve read through the resources that do exist to make a list of past members of the Rust core team and document the history of its formation.
The public record doesn’t make it clear when the Rust core team was formed, though there are references to the phrase “core team” on the mailing list as far back as November 2012. At that point it was an informal designation, with people employed full-time by Mozilla Research on Rust seemingly self-identifying as being on the core team. This would have included:
In the early days Marijn Haverbeke and Rafael Ávila de Espindola were also employed on Rust, probably predating the notion of a core team.
In October 2013 a page was added to the wiki identifying the Rust core team as:
These were again the full-time employees of Mozilla Research working on Rust.
It was in early 2014 when the roster that maintains clear continuity with today’s core team was established, and the only record I see of it is this commit that removes core team members from the wiki. The core team at that point was:
That was a time of extensive internal discussion about Rust’s long-term sustainability and governance structure. These people became the core team by fiat, with the blessing of Dave Herman, still all employees of Mozilla Research. During 2014 Huon Wilson and then Aaron Turon were added to the core team, the first deliberate decisions by the team to expand, Aaron’s appointment announced on the forum, Huon’s seemingly not mentioned anywhere; and in December 2014 Yehuda Katz and Steve Klabnik were added to the team, announced via blog post.
Rust’s governance structure was not made official until February 2015, in RFC 1068, the RFC process itself predating any formal definition of the Rust team structure, but also happening concurrently with the quiet establishment of the 2014 core team.
Using 2014 as the starting point of what is today considered the core team, here is a full list of those who have been on the Rust core team: