In case your company may fund Rust maintainers, please send a quick message to funding@lcnr.de. I would love to hop on a call with you! I want to help you figure out how to fund the development and continuous maintainance of Rust itself, whether that’s via contracting, employment, or donations. I want to better understand whether and how companies would like to fund open source more generally.
I am personally working on Rust full-time since the start of 2022. For this to be sustainable long term, I need to get a reasonable amount of money by doing this. I believe Rust will remain relevant over many years and any work we put into improving its foundation now will be incredibly valuable going forward.
My personal main interests are internal cleanups and large refactorings. I am the lead of the Trait System Refactor Initiative. While work like this often has some immediate benefits, their value lies in enabling new features and improvements going forward.