It's almost 2019! As such, the Rust team needs to create a roadmap for Rust's development next year. At the highest level, Rust's development process looks like this:

1. The Rust community blogs about what they'd like to see.
2. The core team reads these posts, and produces a "roadmap RFC," a proposal for what next year's development looks like.
3. The RFC is widely discussed, and modified in response to feedback, and eventually accepted.
4. This RFC becomes a guideline for accepting or postponing RFCs for the next year.

We try to align this with the calendar year, but it doesn't 100% match up, currently. Last year, we had a call for posts on January 3, the roadmap RFC was opened on Jan 29th, and was accepted on March 5th. This year, we're starting a bit earlier, but it's still not going to be accepted before January 1.

We need you

Starting today and running until of January 15, we’d like to ask the community to write blogposts reflecting on Rust in 2018 and proposing goals and directions for Rust in 2019. Like last year, these can take many forms:

• A post on your personal or company blog
• A Medium post
• A GitHub gist
• Or any other online writing platform you prefer.

We’re looking for posts on many topics:

• Ideas for community programs
• Language features
• Documentation improvements
• Ecosystem needs
• Tooling enhancements
• Or anything else Rust related you hope for in 2019

There's one additional thing this year, however. With the shipping of Rust 2018 today, it's time to think about the next edition. In other words:

• Rust 2015: Stability
• Rust 2018: Productivity
• Rust 2021: ?

We aren't yet committing to an edition in 2021, but that's the current estimate. Each edition has had some sort of theme associated with it. As such, we wouldn't just like to know what you're thinking for Rust in 2019, but also, what you want the theme of Rust 2021 to be. Ideally, suggestions for Rust in 2019 will fit into the overall goal of the next edition, though of course, three years is a lot of time, and so not every single thing must. As Rust matures, we need to start thinking of ever-longer horizons, and how our current plans fit into those eventual plans.

If you're not sure what to write, check out all of the blog posts from last year over at ReadRust. They may give you some inspiration!

You can write up these posts and email them to community@rust-lang.org or tweet them with the hashtag #rust2019.

The Core team will be reading all of the submitted posts and using them to inform the initial roadmap RFC for 2019. Once the RFC is submitted, we’ll open up the normal RFC process, though if you want, you are welcome to write a post and link to it on the GitHub discussion.

We look forward to working with the entire community to make Rust even more wonderful in 2019. Thanks for an awesome 2018!