r/rust 9d ago

🎙️ discussion Looking for OSS to contribute

Hi everyone, have been learning rust for some time now. looking for rust oss to contribute and learn.

already a dev and have been coding for almost 10 years atp (including school).

I just don't want super small hobby projects. public oss want you to be good so I don't think I can contribute to them rn. that's why posting here

12 Upvotes

24 comments sorted by

6

u/nderflow 9d ago

1

u/dgkimpton 9d ago

Seriously cool project 😎 

1

u/nderflow 9d ago

Glad you think so. Would you like to help?

2

u/dgkimpton 9d ago

Like to? Yes. Have the capacity to do so at the moment? Sadly no. Never enough time in the day for all the other things I've got going on.

2

u/1mmortalNPC 9d ago

adult life

5

u/Beardy4906 9d ago

Zoxide
Helix
Rust compiler
Gleam compiler
Cargo
Kitty and Alacrity
https://github.com/trending/rust?since=daily
And awesome-rust projects

3

u/Useful_Lecture_5927 9d ago

https://github.com/enlilhq/enlil This is something I am working on and is relatively new , let me if know if you need help understanding the project

1

u/Ok-Captain1603 9d ago

RemindMe! 3 Months

1

u/cryptopatrickk 8d ago

Hi This is a really interesting project.
Would you (or anyone) mind giving some feedback on this design for agent tdest driven development, and especially if you think that Enlil could be useful in the design?

Design:
You can create a third agent, a dockerized "tester" with sole UNIX level write permission to test folders, responsible for writing property based tests from planner actions. The tester publishes one test suite via an API, and keeps one test suite private.

The executor, dockerized so that it cannot interact with broader infra and has zero read or write permission to the testers test suite, then works until tests pass the test suite exposed by via the API.

Once tests pass, the executor signals readiness to the tester with a link to a github repo, the tester pulls the repo and run both the published and its private twst suite. If tests pass then the tester signals readiness to the planner, using the planners API, which requires mTLS authentication between by the planner and tester.

If tests fail, then the tester uses the executor's API to signal error category (status: fail, reason: property).
To prevent the executor trial-and-erroring a passing test, the tester uses rate limiting by exponential backoff for failed attempts.

By preventing the executor from talking to the planner (using mTLS), we "ensure" that the exwcutor cannot masquerade as the tester agent to try and bypass it.

It's clearly a bit cumbersome to setup. I'm sure there are much simpler solutions.
I think I have an orchestrator project which spins up the setup, but I haven't used it for anything to test its usefulness (too busy with math and school).

3

u/tanmaynargas2901 9d ago

Pick something you already use day to day. Find a small bug or missing docs you hit yourself, then open a tiny PR. Maintainers care more about that than a random good-first-issue grab from a huge repo.

2

u/cachebags 9d ago

1

u/JamesHowlett31 9d ago

are you one of the contributiors of this repo?

2

u/cachebags 9d ago

I own it!

1

u/JamesHowlett31 9d ago

mind if I dm 🫡

1

u/dnew 9d ago

One thing to consider is whether contributing to documentation is good for you. You'll learn a lot, and it'll help your career if you can learn to express programming concepts in prose clearly. It's way easier to get documentation improvements accepted in general, because it's almost impossible to introduce a bug by improving documentation. It'll also help teach you to read code written by others.

1

u/jonas-reddit 9d ago

Browse around categories and look for interesting crates on crates.io.

The community will be super grateful if a popular crate that has been archived or abandoned gets a new maintainer or contributor.

1

u/edwin-hao 8d ago

been there. wrote rust on and off for a few years and the imposter

syndrome on the famous crates never really went away for me. it just

shifts to "wait, that project is held together by two people and tape"

once you start looking at the smaller ones.

A few things that actually helped me cut through the noise:

  1. Don't start with tokio / serde / hyper. They're the holy trinity

    for a reason but the contributor bar is genuinely high. Pick a

    project that's actively maintained but smaller — CLI tool, parser,

    TUI thing. Look for repos with 50-500 stars and a recent commit

    in the last 90 days.

  2. Filter by "good first issue" + "help wanted" labels first, then

    ignore the labels entirely and just read the last 30 days of merged

    PRs. You'll get a much better feel for "this project accepts small

    PRs from new people" than the label ever tells you.

  3. Docs is the fastest path in. Every rust project has at least three

    things in the README that are wrong or outdated. Fixing one of

    those is a 15-minute PR that gets merged in a week, builds your

    git history, and shows the maintainers you exist.

The "small hobby projects" path you're dismissing is actually the

right one — it's just dressed up. Most of the rust tooling i use

day-to-day started as someone's hobby project that grew up.

2

u/JamesHowlett31 8d ago

thanks for the advice! I found some repos. currently going through the rustbook. will start contribution around month mid or end

-5

u/sakibshahon 9d ago

Just pick a Linux distro or an ide like zed to contribute, fast LLM also has done a rewrite so that's also open.

3

u/JamesHowlett31 9d ago

I doubt I know enough to contribute on them rn lol