What can I as an individual do to ensure the major contributors don't give up on Rust in this trying time?
Things I can think of:
As I understand the situation, Servo is in danger but Rust is not in survival mode yet. I guess we should wait the official statement of the Rust team to know more precisely how the Mozilla layoffs will affect Rust.
That's entirely the wrong direction. If there will ever be a scarcity of resources for evolving Rust, this shouldn't be resolved by rushing half-baked solutions/features to stability. The design and development teams should then take a step back instead, and wait until there is again a sufficient amount of workforce to properly discuss and design features.
The main thing I can imagine that will always be the biggest help to Rust is to create and maintain libraries. The more libraries that cover "common" needs, the better for Rust. Everything else is nibbling around the edges (IMHO).
Libraries, Libraries, Libraries! Libraries for All! Hip-Hip Hooray!
Currently, the best thing is to keep on going as usual and wait for news. Not because we say that some fear and doubt isn't normal, but because we need at least some time for a full assessment. Things like this develop very rapidly initially and there's not much information around. Even the people in the Rust project that work at Mozilla don't have full visibility.
I would be surprised if there would be nothing coming up where we need help with, but to know even roughly where the direction will be, we need at least a weeks time.
Positive note: we have that weeks time :).
Maybe help out with https://rust-lang.github.io/compiler-team/working-groups/parselib/ which I think could have a good impact on improve both rustc and rust-analyzer?
Do they have a donation page like rust-analyzer itself?
https://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2020/01/09/towards-a-rust-foundation/
But I don’t think the Rust foundation should do anything like hiring full-time developers, at least not to start. I would also avoid trying to manage larger contracts to hack on rustc. [...] This is a bit difficult: on the one hand, I think there is a strong need for more people to get paid for their work on Rust. On the other hand, I am not sure a foundation is the right institution to be paying them; even if it were, it seems clear that we don’t have enough experience to know how to answer the sorts of difficult questions that will arise as a result.