Rust History & Versions

How Rust started

Graydon Hoare started Rust as a personal project in 2006, frustrated by crashes caused by memory bugs. Mozilla began sponsoring it in 2009 and announced it publicly in 2010, aiming to build a safer, more parallel browser engine (the Servo project; Rust code later shipped in Firefox). Early Rust had a garbage collector and green threads; both were removed in favour of the ownership and borrowing model that defines the language.

Rust 1.0 was released on 15 May 2015 with a promise of stability: code that compiles on Rust 1.x keeps compiling on later 1.x versions.

Timeline of major releases

1. 1.99Oct 2026Current

   • C-variadic function definitions; new lints for raw borrows (1.99.1 followed on 2026-10-15)
2. 1.95Apr 2026Historic

   • if let guards on match arms
3. 1.88Jun 2025Historic

   • Let chains (if let Some(x) = a && x > 0) in the 2024 edition
4. 1.85Feb 2025Historic

   • The Rust 2024 edition and async closures
5. 1.75Dec 2023Historic

   • async fn and impl Trait in traits
6. 1.65Nov 2022Historic

   • Generic associated types and let ... else
7. 1.56Oct 2021Historic

   • The Rust 2021 edition
8. 1.39Nov 2019Historic

   • async/await
9. 1.31Dec 2018Historic

   • The Rust 2018 edition (new module system, non-lexical lifetimes)
10. 1.0May 2015Historic

    • The first stable release and its compatibility promise

Turning points

• The release train (2015): a new stable version every six weeks, with nightly and beta channels; there's no LTS, so staying on the latest stable is the norm.
• Editions (2018, 2021, 2024): opt-in language changes per crate (edition = "2024" in Cargo.toml) without splitting the ecosystem; crates on different editions work together.
• The Rust Foundation (February 2021): after Mozilla's 2020 layoffs, AWS, Google, Huawei, Microsoft and Mozilla founded an independent foundation to support the project.
• Rust in the Linux kernel (Linux 6.1, December 2022): the first Rust infrastructure merged into Linux, followed by drivers; Microsoft and Android also adopted Rust for new low-level code.
• Memory safety push (2020s): security agencies and large companies recommended memory-safe languages for new code, increasing Rust adoption in infrastructure and security-sensitive software.

Which version should I use?

Use the latest stable release (rustup update) and the 2024 edition for new projects. Libraries often declare a minimum supported Rust version (rust-version in Cargo.toml) for users who update more slowly.

Further reading: Rust release notes · Rust editions guide · Rust Foundation

Last reviewed 21 October 2026. Release and support dates come from the official release pages linked above.