Rust is a general purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Mozilla Research. It is designed to be a “safe, concurrent, practical language”, supporting pure-functional, concurrent-actor, imperative-procedural, and object-oriented styles. The language grew out of a personal project by Mozilla employee Graydon Hoare. Mozilla began sponsoring the project in 2009 and announced it for the first time in 2010. The same year, work shifted from the initial compiler (written in OCaml) to the self-hosted compiler written in Rust itself. Known as rustc, it successfully compiled itself in 2011. The self-hosted compiler uses LLVM as its backend. The first numbered pre-alpha release of the Rust compiler occurred in January 2012. Development moves quickly enough that using the stable releases is discouraged. Rust is developed entirely in the open and solicits feedback and contributions from the community. The design of the language has been refined through the experiences of writing the Servo layout engine and the Rust compiler itself. Although its development is sponsored by Mozilla, it is a community project. A large portion of current commits are from community members.