Rust Programming Language Announces New Team to Evolve Official Coding Style

"The Rust programming language is getting so popular that the team behind it is creating a team that's dedicated to defining the default Rust coding style," reports ZDNet:Each language has style guides and, if they're popular enough, may have multiple style guides from major users, like Google, which has its guide for C++ - the language Chrome is written in. Python's Guido van Rossum's posted his styling conventions here. 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 and 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.... But the team responsible for writing the style guide between 2016 and 2018 has "by design" come to end, so now it's now been decided to create the Rust style team, consisting of Josh 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 and the style team wants to craft the tool to make it current for easier coding in Rust, and help adoption. New constructs "by default, get ignored and not formatted by rustfmt," according to a blog post by the Rust style team, "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." The post also notes that the backwards compatibility maintained by rustfmt "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... but [rustfmt] cannot make this the default without causing continuous integration failures in existing projects. We need a way to evolve the default Rust style compatibly, similar in spirit to the mechanisms we use for Rust editions: allowing existing style to continue working, and allowing people to opt into new style. To solve both of these problems, RFC 3309 has revived the Rust style team, with three goals: - Making determinations about styling for new Rust constructs- Evolving the existing Rust style- Defining mechanisms to evolve the Rust style while taking backwards compatibility into account We don't plan to make any earth-shattering style changes; the look and feel of Rust will remain largely the same. Evolutions to the default Rust style will largely consist of established rustfmt options people already widely enable, or would enable if they were stable. We expect that the initial work of the style team will focus on clearing a backlog of new language constructs that lack formatting guidance. Afterwards, we will look towards defining and implementing the mechanisms to evolve the default Rust style, and then begin introducing style improvements.

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