The Rust Foundation today announced the creation of the Rust Innovation Lab that will serve as a stable, neutral home to select Rust projects with governance support, legal and administrative support, fiscal sponsorship, and more.

In today's [1]Rust announcement the Rust Innovation Lab is described as:

"The Rust Innovation Lab (RIL) is designed to provide support for funded Rust-based open source projects from the Rust Foundation in the form of governance, legal, networking, marketing, and administration, while keeping the technical direction solely in the hands of the current maintainers. As with the other work of the Rust Foundation (e.g. its many existing initiatives), the purpose of the RIL is to strengthen the Rust ecosystem generally."

There is also a Rust Innovation Lab page now as part of [2]RustFoundation.org that further spells out the focus of this new lab.

In announcing the Rust Innovation Lab, they also announced the [3]Rustls is the first project part of this lab. Rustls is the performant and modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language.



[1] https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/09/03/welcoming-the-rust-innovation-lab/

[2] https://rustfoundation.org/rust-innovation-lab/

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Rustls