Image: skynesher/Getty

The Rust programming language is getting so popular that the people behind it are creating a team that's dedicated to defining the default Rust coding style. 

Rust, as developer analyst RedMonk puts it, is the "developer darling" of the moment and the most desirable contender for new code that would otherwise be written in C or C++, thanks to its automated way of ensuring secure memory management. 

Rust is not one of the most popular languages, such as Java or Python, but it's being used by developers on big infrastructure projects. Rust has been officially welcomed by Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds and has made inroads into Android, Windows, Amazon Web Services, and Facebook parent Meta, to name a few -often in cases where a project sees fit for Rust to be used where C/C++ would have been adopted instead.  

Open Source

• GitHub vs GitLab: Which program is right for you?
• The best Linux distros for beginners
• Feren OS is a Linux distribution that's as lovely as it is easy to use
• How to add new users to your Linux machine

Every programming language has style guides and, if they're popular enough, they might have multiple style guides from major users, such as Google, which has its guide for C++ -the language Chrome is written in. Python's Guido van Rossum has posted his styling conventions here. 

Also:The most popular programming languages and where to learn them

Rust, which reached version 1.0 in 2015, has a style guide in the "rustfmt" or 'Rust formatting tool' published on GitHub. The tool automatically formats Rust code to let developers focus on output. It aims to reduce the steep learning curve confronting new Rust developers. The guide instructs developers to "Use spaces, not tabs" and says "each level of indentation must be 4 spaces", for example.

As Josh Triplett explains in a recent Rust blog post: "The standardized style helps Rust developers feel comfortable and at home in many different projects, and the tooling support from rustfmt makes it easy to maintain and to incorporate in continuous integration."

But the team responsible for writing the style guide between 2016 and 2018 has "by design" come to an end, so now it's now been decided to create the new Rust style team, consisting of Triplett, Caleb Cartwright, Michal Goulet, and Jane Lusby. 

The crew will first tackle a "backlog of new language constructs that lack formatting guidance" and move on to "defining and implementing the mechanisms to evolve the default Rust style, and then begin introducing style improvements."

The work includes minor language changes, big structural changes, and backwards compatibility. Also, the style team wants to craft the tool to make it current for easier coding in Rust, and help adoption. 

"As the Rust language develops, we have a regular need for improvements to the style guide, such as to support new language constructs. This includes minor language changes, as well as highly anticipated new features such as let-chaining (RFC 2497) and let-else (RFC 3137). New constructs like these, by default, get ignored and not formatted by rustfmt, and subsequently need formatting added. Some of this work has fallen to the rustfmt team in recent years, but the rustfmt team would prefer to implement style determinations made by another team rather than making such determinations itself," writes Triplett. 

"In addition, rustfmt maintains backwards compatibility guarantees: code that has been correctly formatted with rustfmt won't get formatted differently with a future version of rustfmt. This avoids churn, and avoids creating CI failures when people use rustfmt to check style in CI. However, this also prevents evolving the Rust style to take community desires into account and improve formatting over time. rustfmt provides various configuration options to change its default formatting, and many of those options represent changes that many people in the community would like enabled by default."

Developer

It's the end of programming as we know it -- againDevelopers feel secure in their jobs, but they're still thinking about quittingThe future of the web will need a different sort of software developerThe best Linux laptops for consumers and developers

• It's the end of programming as we know it -- again
• Developers feel secure in their jobs, but they're still thinking about quitting
• The future of the web will need a different sort of software developer
• The best Linux laptops for consumers and developers