Rust turns 11, JetBrains highlights its rise from stable release

Rust’s 11th anniversary was less a birthday candle moment than a reminder of how far the language has moved since its first stable release. When JetBrains’ RustRover account marked the milestone on May 15, it put the focus on the same thing Rust developers have spent a decade chasing: a language that feels safer to bet real software on, not just a fast-moving experiment.

That change started on May 15, 2015, when Rust 1.0 shipped. The Rust team framed that release as the beginning of a stability commitment, with breaking changes largely out of scope and a train-based release model built around regular six-week updates. The groundwork was visible months earlier, when Rust 1.0 alpha was announced on January 9, 2015 as feature-complete for 1.0. The final timeline had already pointed to May 15, 2015, so the stable launch arrived as a promised endpoint rather than a surprise.

From there, Rust’s appeal hardened around three words the community still repeats for a reason: memory safety, performance and concurrency. Those goals turned Rust from a language with a loud following into one with a broader reputation for reliability, especially in systems code where one bad memory bug can ruin an entire release. The community’s annual survey process, which began in 2016, gave the project a way to track whether the ecosystem was maturing along with the language itself.

The 10th anniversary showed how much that maturity had become part of Rust’s identity. On May 15, 2025, exactly 10 years after the stable release, the Rust team celebrated with Rust 1.87.0 from Utrecht, Netherlands. The Rust Foundation marked the date as a full decade since Rust 1.0, and the community’s own retrospective drew a clean line between the early churn and the post-1.0 era, when Rust became much easier to use for large software.

JetBrains has been pushing on that same pressure point from the tooling side. RustRover arrived as a standalone Rust IDE in September 2023, gained a free non-commercial option in May 2024, and then added features that make real projects easier to navigate, including native cargo-nextest integration and call hierarchy support in 2026.1. That is the practical after picture of Rust’s first decade: a language once defined by its difficult promises now surrounded by tools, surveys and release discipline that make those promises easier to keep.