Roadmaps: Looking to the future
Roadmaps offer a “zoomed out” view of the Rust project direction. Each roadmap collects a set of related project goals into a coherent theme. A typical roadmap takes several years to drive to completion, so when you look at the roadmap, you’ll see not only the work we expect to do this year, but a preview of the work we expect in future years (to the extent we know that).
Active roadmaps
Not every goal is part of a roadmap, nor are they all expected to be. This initial set of roadmaps is based on the trends that we saw in the 2026 goals. Over time, we expect to add more roadmaps and refine their structure to help people quickly see where Rust is going.
| Roadmap | Point of contact | What and why |
|---|---|---|
Beyond the & | Tyler Mandry | Smart pointers (Arc, Pin, FFI wrappers) get the same ergonomics as & and &mut — reborrowing, field access, in-place init |
| The Borrow Checker Within | Niko Matsakis | Make the borrow checker’s rules visible in the type system — place-based lifetimes, view types, and internal references built on Polonius |
| Constify all the things | Oliver Scherer | Const generics accept structs and enums; compile-time reflection means serialize(&my_struct) works without derives |
| Just add async | Niko Matsakis | Patterns that work in sync Rust should work in async Rust — traits, closures, drop, scoped tasks |
| Project Zero | lcnr | Fix all known type system unsoundnesses so Rust’s safety guarantees are actually reliable |
| Rust for Linux | Tomas Sedovic | Build the Linux kernel with only stable language features. |
| Safety-Critical Rust | Pete LeVasseur | MC/DC coverage, a specification that tracks stable releases, and unsafe documentation — the evidence safety assessors need |