Open Source software is the foundation of Tag1 Consulting’s business, and it is essential to our core values that we contribute to and support the open source communities we benefit from.

Just as we support the Drupal Association as an Enterprise Supporting partner and Platinum sponsor of DrupalCon NA, we are proud to announce that we are the first Silver member of the Rust Foundation.

Rust is a fast and reliable open source programming language with a rapidly growing user base. It currently boasts close to 56,000 stars, and nearly 8,000 forks on its GitHub repository. There are over 250 thousand public GitHub repos written in Rust. As open source projects grow, they can outstrip the ability of any one person or small group to maintain that growth and infrastructure, ensure community health, and sustain a vision for the software. This is where many open source projects such as Mozilla, Linux, Drupal, and others form a foundation to help continue and enable the work the community is doing. The Rust community follows the path other projects have taken in forming their foundation; read their press release here.

The Rust Foundation is an independent non-profit organization to steward the Rust programming language and ecosystem, with a unique focus on supporting the set of maintainers that govern and develop the project.

Why We Love Rust

Tag1’s open source load testing framework, Goose, is the most scalable load testing tool, in large part due to the performance provided by Rust. Goose also relies on several open source crates written in Rust, such as Tokio.rs (providing an asynchronous runtime and supporting functions), Serde.rs (efficient and reliable serialization and deserialization of objects sent between threads and processes and during logging), Flume (supplying extremely performant and flexible communication channels between threads), and Reqwest (the HTTP-client used for writing load tests).

Tag1 uses the Rust language in software we build for our clients and internally for some of our proprietary internal operations and management software - software that runs our business. Switching from Python to Rust significantly reduced the time taken to process large record sets, and enhanced stability and reliability in this critical part of our infrastructure.

We chose Rust for these projects for many reasons, not the least of which is that it solves many problems inherent in other programming languages. Rust requires no garbage collection due to its concept of ownership, an ingenious solution to memory management that ensures consistent and reliable performance. The ownership model in the code offers compile-time memory and thread safety, making it surprisingly easy to write safe and performant code. And of course, we chose it for the speed it can accomplish both simple and complex tasks!

Even before I really understood the language it was speeding up my code by a factor or more; as I get better with the language I'm able to squeeze out considerably more performance. - Jeremy Andrews - CEO and Founding Partner, Tag1 Consulting

Supporting Open Source that Supports Us

Supporting Rust as a project -- and the Rust Foundation -- is important to Tag1. Open source software flourishes when supported by companies that use that software, and that work to boost the communities behind it. For that reason, Tag1 also sponsors the Drupal Association, helping ensure Drupal and its platform are always improving and at the ready for the community.

Communities are the lifeblood of open source projects. Drupal’s motto says it best, “come for the software, stay for the community”; the community is what powers, and makes all of the difference for a large open source project, and it is personally and professionally rewarding to be a part of these communities.

The Rust community is always ready to help new and experienced users alike with any problem or question, and they’ve written excellent documentation. Fostering this community furthers the abilities of every user to create new things.

Tag1 encourages healthy and continuous growth in open source and its communities. We are proud to be members of the Rust Foundation, and eager to promote and help their goals.


See our other Goose content to learn more about this highly scalable load testing software.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash