Giving Back: The Rust Foundation

We recently contributed $100,000 to the Rust Foundation and would like to share the reasoning behind our decision and the process that led us to this commitment.

A slice of Lambda's history is that it started as a group of engineers with experience working on scalable and fault-tolerating systems. One of our main tools was (and still is) the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem, which is an extraordinary solution for certain categories of problems, and allows easy extension via writing C and an FFI. However, many of the fault-tolerant properties provided by the platform are put at risk when linking with C code. We viewed Rust as an excellent complement which would allow us to get the best of both worlds.
In time, we found the areas Rust excells in, and today many of our production system rely on the language and community behind the tools and libraries we use.

Another slice of our history is that Lambda hails from South America and specifically from Argentina, a place where tech companies are a bit of underdogs at times. What many people do not know is that some of our strengths are directly related to this. Argentina boasts a public education system allowing anyone to get higher education. Many of Lambda's employees are also professors and work at several universities. We work together with them to teach Rust and ensure a healthy hiring pool and improve future possibilities for all students.

In short, we are proud to give back to the community that helped us grow, grateful to the Rust Foundation for channeling contributions, and we hope to continue contributing as our means allow.