# Are we Rust yet? Yes, but ... Rust is the primary language used in the NEAR ecosystem, and the tools in Rust received a lot of love. Still, the Developer Journey for Rust Development on NEAR is not fully delivered even though all the pieces are already there! ## Developer Journey of Application Developer on NEAR with Rust/Swift/Kotlin/... experience 1. **Welcome to NEAR!** - there are welcoming and supportive communities at [DevHub Communities](/devhub.near/widget/app?page=communities), [Discord](https://near.chat), [Telegram @neardev](https://t.me/neardev), and a number of regional hubs. There are still some open challenges: * The DevHub Communities catalog is still incomplete and hard to search unless you know the community you need. _Let's complete the catalog and provide various views on the DevHub's communities list based on activity, area of involvement, etc._ * Communities are still not discoverable peer-to-peer. _Let's do a better job of interlinking communities from each other (e.g. make regular posts with useful resources and links to other relevant communities)._ 2. **Get started** - there are [a number of examples](https://github.com/near-examples/), great local & [online development environment](https://github.com/near/cargo-near-new-project-template) thanks to [interactive CLIs](https://github.com/near/cargo-near), easy-to-use [contracts development framework](https://github.com/near/near-sdk-rs), and [integration testing framework](https://github.com/near/near-workspaces-rs). There are still some open challenges: * There is no high-level picture of how all the tools fit together. _Let's create one high-level map and reference it everywhere._ * There is no recommended crash course into Rust to get productive with contract development. _Let's select and explicitly recommend to scan through those instead of learning the whole Rust book on day one. Those could be selected chapters from [Rust by example](https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/), [Google's Comprehensive Rust Book](https://google.github.io/comprehensive-rust/)._ * Tools do not feature each other, which makes it harder to build a proper mental model. _Let's improve READMEs to have a unified look and provide references to other tools and relevant communities._ * Testnet environment is not promoted. _Let's emphasize how it enables rapid experimentation._ * Contract development best practices are not communicated. _Let's create a catalog of best practices (e.g. how/when/why to use standards [NEPs], how to get the best out of the local storage, how to deal with data migration after contract upgrades, when it makes sense to use off-chain indexers)._ 3. **Go to production** - it is easy to deploy to mainnet thanks to [cargo-near](https://github.com/near/cargo-near), and [NEAR RPC providers](https://docs.near.org/api/rpc/introduction), [Indexers](https://docs.near.org/concepts/data-flow/data-storage), [Explorers](https://explorer.near.org), and SourceScan help to be productive and insightful. There are still some open challenges: * Developers need some NEAR tokens on mainnet to get things deployed. _Let's create some pool with a semi-automated process where developers can come and request some NEAR for the development (public GitHub repo should be required to make the request)._ * Preparing for production best practices are not communicated. _Let's create a catalog of best practices (e.g. how to secure your contract account, how to ensure contract upgradability without full access keys, how to react to exploited vulnerabilities)._ * Security considerations are often a major roadblock before going live. _Let's provide more automated tools to stress the code as much as possible (code coverage, generating tests with AI, etc)._ * Collecting insights about the app usage is still hard. _Let's explore if RPC providers could offer anonymized aggregated insights about view function calls and some other metrics, chain analytics could also be easier._ 4. **Invite others** - many of us came to NEAR for the great tech and awesome community. There are still some open challenges: * We rely on the goodwill of our community members spreading the word. _Let's recognize our most prominent tech advocates, and invite others to be NEAR tech advocates! Let's build [Peer-to-Peer learning clubs](https://peerlab.community/)!_ ---- Feel free to comment your updates and we will post this same post with the updated sections in the future to keep track of our progress on the Rust Developer Journey on NEAR.