Changes to Rust compiler team

Dec. 14, 2020 · Felix S. Klock II on behalf of the compiler team

There have been important changes recently to the Rust compiler team.

Leadership Rotation

Here is something very new for our team: We are rotating the leadership. Niko Matsakis will be stepping down from their role as co-lead, and Wesley Wiser will be joining Felix Klock as the co-leads for the team.

Niko remains a compiler team member and will continue his contributions, especially on the RFC 2229, Polonius and Chalk projects. Niko's blog post discusses their motivations for stepping down in more detail.

Wesley has been contributing to Rust since 2015, and became a compiler team member in 2019. Wesley has contributed heavily to the compiler's self-profile infrastructure, to its collection of MIR optimizations, and to its const-eval and incremental compilation subsystems. Wesley has also already proven himself as an effective leader: they are currently co-lead of several working groups: wg-incr-comp, wg-prioritization, and wg-self-profile.

Niko and I are delighted that Wesley is taking on this new leadership role, and I look forward to steering the compiler alongside them.

Membership Changes

In addition to the changes in leadership, we also have a new compiler team member to announce: lcnr.

lcnr has been contributing to the compiler since 2018. They have improved the type system via changes such as higher-ranked lifetimes in predicates (#73503), and also have focused for the past two years on improving Rust's support for complex generic expressions in constants (tracked at #76560)