Become a sponsor to David Tolnay
- 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 2026, 72% of all published crates on crates.io depend transitively on syn; 51% depend transitively on serde; 55% 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, odd 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.
Featured work
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dtolnay/cxx
Safe interop between Rust and C++
Rust 6,784 -
dtolnay/anyhow
Flexible concrete Error type built on std::error::Error
Rust 6,605 -
dtolnay/thiserror
derive(Error) for struct and enum error types
Rust 5,492 -
dtolnay/proc-macro-workshop
Learn to write Rust procedural macros [Rust Latam conference, Montevideo Uruguay, March 2019]
Rust 4,834 -
dtolnay/syn
Parser for Rust source code
Rust 3,384 -
dtolnay/cargo-expand
Subcommand to show result of macro expansion
Rust 3,115
$1 a month
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$100 a month
SelectMy small company has benefited from @dtolnay's contributions and we would like to incentivize his ongoing valuable work.
$350 a month
Select@dtolnay's contributions have saved my small company some engineering effort and we would like to recognize that with a one time bonus.
$1,000 a month
SelectMy large company has benefited quite a bit from @dtolnay's contributions and we would like to incentivize his ongoing valuable work.
$3,500 a month
Select@dtolnay's contributions have saved my large company a substantial amount of engineering effort and we would like to recognize that with a one time bonus.