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@dtolnay

David Tolnay

dtolnay
Redwood City, California

💡Tip: If you are open to suggestions who to sponsor so that your money makes the biggest difference in Rust being awesome, you should be sponsoring lcnr and WaffleLapkin.


  • I work on the Rust standard library API team reviewing every API change to the standard library.
  • I maintain foundational Rust crates including serde, syn, quote that practically everyone working with Rust will use. As of 2024, 64% of all published crates on crates.io depend transitively on syn; 42% depend transitively on serde; 44.5% depend directly on at least one crate by me.
  • I create teaching material for advanced Rust concepts including my case studies project, procedural macro workshop, and Rust quiz.
  • I set an example for thoughtful Rust library design, as seen in anyhow or thiserror.
  • I have earned a reputation for regularly coming up with highly creative, out-there but ultimately highly valuable ideas.


  • Some examples of interesting projects:
    • Watt, a runtime for executing Rust procedural macros compiled as WebAssembly designed to provide faster compilation, isolation, and determinism.
    • Async-trait, a macro for using async functions in Rust traits with dynamic dispatch.
    • No-panic, make the compiler verify it's impossible for a function to panic.
    • Cargo-expand, Cargo subcommand to show the result of macro expansion.
    • Trybuild, a library for testing the diagnostics a user would see from an incorrect macro call.
    • Prettyplease, a lightweight pretty-printer that is well suited to generated code and much faster than rustfmt.

Current sponsors 157

@rerun-io
@surrealdb
@shuttle-hq
Private Sponsor
@upsuper
@kingrongH
@koushiro
@ndebuhr
@imbolc
Private Sponsor
@stensonowen
@surferjeff
@spachava753
@jimmiebfulton
@fanatid
@Roms1383
Private Sponsor
Private Sponsor
@matchai
@freopen
@nickwb
@yammmt
@mayfieldiv
@fluxxu
@finnbear
@emilk
@zaporter
@athre0z
@martialmarel
@Millione
@ehsanmok
@ktanaka101
@rkusa
@Enselic
@uint
@ekzhang
@radu-matei
@orhun
@enriquephl
@arcstur
@chungquantin
@marekvospel
@dmeijboom
@twitchax
@markhakansson
@Stebalien
@stegaBOB
Private Sponsor
@HansMusterWhatElse
@j7nw4r
@3colorr
@AdamSimpson
@michaelklishin
@0x0177b11f
Past sponsors 233
@Traverse-Research
@thesocialproxy
@Shella
@build-trust
@denoland
@embark-studios
@ZhangHanDong
@anirudh-chhangani
@ivansandrk
@seeekr
@scott-wilson
@joshuajbouw
Private Sponsor
@Aaditya-Sahay
@landaire
@saethlin
@Banou26
@koka831

Featured work

  1. dtolnay/cxx

    Safe interop between Rust and C++

    Rust 5,991
  2. dtolnay/anyhow

    Flexible concrete Error type built on std::error::Error

    Rust 5,618
  3. dtolnay/thiserror

    derive(Error) for struct and enum error types

    Rust 4,620
  4. dtolnay/proc-macro-workshop

    Learn to write Rust procedural macros  [Rust Latam conference, Montevideo Uruguay, March 2019]

    Rust 4,272
  5. dtolnay/syn

    Parser for Rust source code

    Rust 2,943
  6. dtolnay/cargo-expand

    Subcommand to show result of macro expansion

    Rust 2,722

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