GitHub Sponsor Rust developer David Tolnay

#github #opensource #rust

When I open the Explore GitHub Sponsors page the first Rust developer on the list was David Tolnay. It's a bit strange, or maybe not, that the people are only listed by their GitHub user name and not by the name they have in their GitHub profile. So I saw dtolnay.

I already recognized his name for a number of reasons. I already saw some of his crates and noticed that his family name is Hungarian so I guess either he himself was born there or his family is from there or from one of the neighboring countries.

Oh and besides, he has authored some really important crates, as the 3rd-party libraries are called in Rust.

Which of his projects do I use?

GitHub Sponsors tells my projects depend on 17 of his crates. I can click on that link to see the list of those crates that include

syn, of course; serde-yaml that was recently marked as unmaintained, and thiserror. He also wrote anyhow, and a total of 161 crates.

I also noticed that the list includes links that would list my repositories that use the specific projects. This was something I was missing when I discussed the projects of Sindre Sorhus.

GitHub profile

His GitHub profile has no extra content. Besides, of course the list of all of his projects.

dtolnay (David Tolnay) · GitHub

dtolnay has 110 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

github.com

GitHub Sponsors profile

On his GitHub Sponsors profile the first thing I notice is that he actually recommends the sponsoring of two other Rust developers: lcnr and WaffleLapkin. I guess I'll review their work and their profiles in another post.

As he writes:

As of 2024, 60% of all published crates on crates.io depend transitively on syn; 40% depend transitively on serde; 42.5% depend directly on at least one crate by me.

So it is not surprising he was on the top of my list as well.

He has 173 sponsors. Based on the tiers it seems that he is especially expecting companies to finance his work. He has a $1/month tier for individuals and then the next one is $100/month and $350 one-time bonus for small companies. And then $1000/month and $3500 one-time bonus for large companies.

The wording is quite interesting. The $100/month is for companies that benefited from his work and the $350 one-time bonus is for companies that saved some engineering work by the work of @dtolnay.

The recommended people

I'll look at their profiles more in detail later, but just for the record:

lcnr who has 31 sponsors
WaffleLapkin who has 17 sponsors.

Conclusion

David is also someone who created a lot of libraries that many people depend on. So it is not surprising that despite his call to support two other people, he still has quite a few sponsors.