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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 has expertise on different parts of the compiler, consult this "experts map".

It's not perfectly complete, though, so please 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 issues
  • label:T-compiler will only show issues related to the compiler
  • label: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:

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.

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 (e.g. chalk is largely owned by WG-traits). 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.