In 2024 the Rust and WebAssembly Working Group was officially archived in the Rust project after ~5 years of inactivity with an intent to shut down the rustwasm GitHub Organization soon after. Although a bit later than intended the purpose of this post is to give a concrete timeline for this process in which the rustwasm GitHub Organization will become fully archived.

The wasm-bindgen repository is going to be transferred to a new wasm-bindgen organization with new additional maintainers. All other repositories in the rustwasm organization are going to be archived in place or transferred to their existing maintainers if they elect to do so. Transferring wasm-bindgen will occur in the weeks following this post and archiving the organization is going to happen September 2025.

The rustwasm organization has historically been under the purview of the Rust and WebAssembly Working Group, and given the historical prominence of some projects it contained, this post is serving as an announcement of upcoming plans for repositories in the organization.

History of the Rust and WebAssembly Working Group

The Rust and WebAssembly Working Group was created in 2018 as part of the initiative for the 2018 edition at the time. Through 2019 the working group was quite active and helped Rust's support for WebAssembly flourish. Tools such as wasm-bindgen and wasm-pack were created as part of this effort and continue to be used to this day. After 2019 though the organization saw a drastic reduction in activity and most projects have been in maintenance mode for nearly 5 years at this point.

While the working group has been officially archived for over a year now the repositories in the rustwasm organization continued on and continued to see some use and minor maintenance. This has perpetuated a confusing situation for users and maintainers alike where it's not clear what the maintenance story for many of these repositories are and how to move forward with the repositories that are actively in use.

Sunsetting the rustwasm Organization

In September of 2025 the rustwasm GitHub organization will be archived to cease all activity within the organization. This will help clarify that rustwasm is no longer a central hub for all things Rust-and-WebAssembly but instead is a historical archive of efforts.

The rustwasm organization has a number of repositories within it, most of which haven't seen any activity in quite some time. The current plan at this time is to arrange for wasm-bindgen to be transferred to a new project-specific organization and additionally add new fresh maintainers to assist with project direction going forward. All other repositories in the rustwasm organization will be archived or transferred to their existing maintainers if needed.

Transferring wasm-bindgen

The wasm-bindgen project is relied on in a number of contexts today and existing users have expressed interest in both maintaining and growing the repository over time. The rustwasm organization is no longer a great home for this work so the plan is to transfer it out to a new home in a neutral location not owned by any one person or company. This transfer will be coupled with inviting new maintainers to the repository for improved project maintenance in addition to evolving the project.

While a critical mass of new maintainers has already been reached, if you are interested in helping out with maintenance an issue has been created to coordinate efforts around maintenance with wasm-bindgen. Feel free to leave a comment there to help out with this transition.

Archiving other repositories

The current plan at this time is to archive all other repositories in the rustwasm organization. This includes repositories such as:

• https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-pack
• https://github.com/rustwasm/gloo
• https://github.com/rustwasm/twiggy
• https://github.com/rustwasm/walrus
• https://github.com/rustwasm/weedle
• (see https://github.com/orgs/rustwasm/repositories for the full list)

Note: wasm-bindgen depends on crates such as walrus and weedle at this time and won't depend on archived repositories. Depending on how maintainers would like to organize it these dependencies may be inlined into the wasm-bindgen repository for wasm-bindgen's needs or they may be transferred to the new wasm-bindgen organization. Regardless wasm-bindgen will not be using unmaintained dependencies.

If you are an preexisting maintainer of one of these repositories please reach out to have the repository transferred to you. Otherwise it's not clear at this time whether these repositories are still actively in use or how much they're relied on. The historically trusted nature of the rustwasm organization means it's not quite as simple as transferring these repositories to the first volunteer. Instead transferring repositories will require vetting new maintainers for trustworthiness and reliability and unfortunately the current admin of the rustwasm organization is not prepared to do this.

If your use case critically relies on these repositories it is recommended to fork the repository. Where required it's possible to leave a message in the old README pointing to the fork. If a fork is not viable then understanding is appreciated in that the rustwasm organization has been inactive for over 5 years now and there are no known active maintainers to reach out to. Charting a path for each repository requires a significant amount of effort to understand current users and plan for future users and no one is available to perform this work. The goal of this effort is to do the best with maintainers/admins that still remain and while not a perfect answer it's predicted the best answer in many cases here is archiving the repository.

As an absolute last resort you can reach out to @alexcrichton on Zulip to discuss alternatives.

Timeline for transfers/archives

The wasm-bindgen repository will be transferred to a new wasm-bindgen organization in the weeks after this post. Some minor details still need to be sorted out maintainer-wise and that's all that's left to do. Afterwards a final grace period will be allowed until September at which point the rustwasm organization will become fully archived. Issues will be filed in various repositories giving a heads up to any interested folks indicating as such.