I remember watching your 'Intro to the Rust programming language' video in 2014, when I knew nothing of Rust. Your clear explanation about the problems of aliasing into memory made me think, well this is interesting. 6 years later and I've dropped C and moved to Rust. Also thanks for the socket2 crate ! All the best in whatever you get up to next. Nick
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I want to publically thank Alex for all his work, and for being an excellent person all around. I met Alex during the first Rust/GNOME hackfest in Mexico City, and he's been kind enough to attend later editions of the hackfest too. Every single time he was the go-to person for basically everything. I have questions about proc macros? Alex knows the answer and kindly and painstakingly explains all the intricacies. I have extremely shitty code dealing with macros? Alex goes and rewrites it, no problem, all while engaged in wonderful conversation. No questions asked when introduced to Mexican street tacos served out of a bicycle.
I've never seen anyone use vim more proficiently, and as an Emacs person that just blows my mind 
Godspeed, Alex, it's great to work with you!
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Alex, thank you for all your hard work. You've always been so helpful and responsive to issues on any repo I've interacted with you on, which is amazing because of their shear breadth. Thank you for everything, you've always been an inspiration!
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It was an honor to meet you back in 2014 when I was interning. I still remember you as one of the most humble, kindest engineers I've ever met, and I still try to live up to your example to this day! 
Thanks for all you have put into Rust so far, and thanks for being an amazing human in general - I'm so glad to hear you are putting yourself first.
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Alex, I've always thought you were just an astonishingly pleasant person to work with. And it boggles my mind how much you've done so much for the Rust project.
Enjoy your break! It's well deserved.
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I've greatly benefited from the results of your work Alex. Especially proc macros (no more hand writing parsers, ever! Thanks to dtolnay, too!) and Cargo, the most sensible package manage I've ever seen. The way semver+lockfiles+cargo update work is brilliant.
Thank you a lot!
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I wish you all the baguettes, Alex.
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Thanks for everything, Alex! I’ve used so much of your work and libraries! 
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@alexcrichton, What needs to change for you to not scale back your involvement, at least not this much? Maybe the Rust community can help.
I (a Rust newbie who is excited by both Rust & WASM) am asking this question because no one else is. And I only know two reasons that trigger a very good and passionate programmer to leave/reduce work on a beloved project:
- dissatisfaction on some level: project plans, organization, team dynamic, community, salary, etc.
- something else more important & with a much better future has appeared
And yes, 1) can trigger a degree of burnout when you give too much for too little over a long period of time.
I wish you success.
- health or family
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Thank you Alex for all you have done for Rust. I will definitely miss your personal warmth to other contributors and your anti-sloppiness attitude in the design of the language and the libraries.
Hope all the best for all your future endeavors!
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I just wanted to say thanks to everyone for the kind words, y'all are all why working on Rust has been such a pleasure!
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Looks like I am late to he party but let me join in the choir here. I cannot even count the number of times that digging into the deep parts of something in the rustc repository ended with the realization that, of course, it was Alex who set this all up, because who else could it have been?
I remember being in some apartement in Rome with Alex and a few others (when RustFest was there), writing the initial version of cargo miri setup which involves quite a bit of OS interaction (not just file system stuff but also starting processes and capturing their output), and once it worked on my system CI said it worked on macOS and even Windows on basically the first try. I was rather surprised, and Alex looked quite proud when I told him. 
Alex, I wish you the very best in your future endeavors, and I cannot thank you enough for all that you have done to make Rust amazing. You are one of those people where I am not sure that Rust would have worked without you. I hope we meet again!
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Many thanks and we're excited to see what comes next. Your wasm/wasi work laid a great foundation.
sad to hear. Your name is all over the place when I pick up rust crates for the last couple years 
Thank you for all your excellent work over the years! Needless to say, you've contributed enormously to the project, and your contributions will be missed. Glad to hear you're still staying involved at some level though.
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Alex, thank you for all the great work, good luck with anything that lies ahead!
Thank you for all your amazing work Alex — it seems like nearly every time I start digging into why something in the world of Rust is the way it is, your name is right at the center of it. You've helped make Rust the success it is today, and I think your contributions will also help sustain Rust far into the future. Best of luck going forward; I look forward to whatever you come up with next!
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I somehow missed this until now but better late than never:
I wish you all the best for the future. I think you're one of the few people without whom Rust would not have succeeded the way it did. I has been a pleasure working with you over the last seven years!
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In addition to this, I see you're still listed as the backup contact for the Rust security team.