> hile Rust is younger and has been run by a small group of volunteers for years now

I thought Rust was getting financial support from Google, Microsoft and Mozilla? Or was the Rust Foundation just a convenient way for Mozilla to fire a large amount of developers and we are actually rapidly approaching the OpenSSL Heartbleed state. Where everyone is happily building on a secure foundation that is maintained by a half dead intern when he isn't busy begging for scraps on the street?

Mozilla hasn’t supported development on the Rust project for about 5 years now, since laying off all the developers working on it in August 2020.

Since then several Rust project developers did find full time jobs in companies like Amazon, Meta etc. But corporate interest ebbs and flows. For example Huawei employed a couple of engineers to improve the compiler for several years but they lost interest a couple of months ago.

The Rust Foundation is powered by donations, but a lot of its expenses went on funding infrastructure, security, legal expenses. But this problem of funding the maintainers of the project is on their radar. Yesterday they started an initiative to fund raise for the Maintainers Fund, with the money going straight to maintainers who aren’t being paid by their employer to do it full time. (https://rustfoundation.org/media/announcing-the-rust-foundat...)