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Welcome to the final episode of this season of Rust in Production. My guest is Orhun Parmaksız from JetBrains, and we talk about building developer tools with Rust. JetBrains is best known for IntelliJ IDEA, Kotlin, and a long line of IDEs for professional software teams. In the Rust world, that now includes RustRover: a commercial IDE built on the IntelliJ platform, with deep Rust support for…
In Rust, some traits can’t be used as trait objects with dyn Trait . When a trait can’t be used with dynamic dispatch, we say it’s “not dyn compatible.” 1 This has an impact on how you can use these traits in your code. I think that’s one area where the Rust compiler could print a more helpful error message. Fixing the issue is mostly about tradeoffs between compile-time generics and runtime…
We talked about patterns for defensive programming in Rust before, in which implicit invariants that aren’t enforced by the compiler lead to utter misery. But being careful isn’t enough! Even valid code can fail at runtime in ways that are hard to predict and control. That’s what we’re covering next. This article is for you if you want to… make your code resilient at runtime harden your Rust code…
In workshops I often see people getting frustrated with Rust. Here’s some of the feedback I hear: “The borrow checker rules make it hard to write code that compiles.” “It’s overwhelming! The syntax is complex with too many symbols and operators. 1 ” “It’s difficult to transition to Rust from .” “The code is not satisfying to read, it feels clunky and verbose.” From these frustrations, people often…
Most Rust developers use the language, compiler, package registry, and tooling every day without thinking too much about the organization that helps keep parts of that ecosystem funded and sustainable. This episode is a re-introduction to the Rust Foundation: what it does, what it does not do, how it relates to the Rust Project, and why that distinction matters for teams using Rust professionally.…
Most Rust in Production stories are about scale and performance. This one is a story about low-cost phones and patchy mobile connections in Africa, where a student is learning maths over WhatsApp. The whole point is to support hundreds of thousands of students cheaply enough to run at government scale. My guest is Dylan Brown, a Senior Engineering Manager at Rising Academies, and he comes at Rust…
There’s a particular kind of pressure that comes with maintaining software at the very bottom of someone else’s stack. ClickHouse lives in exactly that spot: roughly 1.5 million lines of mostly C++ and tens of millions of tests every single day. So what happens when you start introducing Rust into a codebase like that? Not as a rewrite, but linked into a C++ server with a CMake build process that…
Safe Rust eliminates all data races. What it does not do is prevent race conditions in the broader sense: deadlocks, livelocks, and logic bugs in your synchronization. What’s the difference? These two terms get used interchangeably all the time, even by experienced developers, so it’s worth writing down exactly what Rust promises and what it does not. What Is a Data Race? To quote the Rustonomicon…
I don’t know about you, but to me there are few things as interesting as the hardware/software interface: the point where carefully written code meets the messy, physical world of sensors, lenses, and real-time constraints. It’s where a clever abstraction either holds up or falls apart the moment a real signal hits it. That makes Veo a perfect guest. The Copenhagen-based company builds AI-powered…
Out of all the migrations I help teams with, Go to Rust is a bit of an outlier. It’s not a question of “is Rust faster?” or “does Rust have types?”, Go already gets you most of the way there. The discussion is mostly about correctness guarantees , runtime tradeoffs , and developer ergonomics . A quick disclaimer before we start: this guide is heavily backend-focused . Backend services are where Go…
Hot off the press: this episode is a live recording from Rust Week in Utrecht, just two days ago. On stage with me are two people who hardly need an introduction in the Linux world: Greg Kroah-Hartman , Linux Foundation Fellow, stable kernel maintainer and an embassador for the kernel, and Alice Ryhl , core maintainer of Tokio and one of the driving forces behind Rust for Linux at Google. I have…
Every time you load a website, send an email, or update an app, you’re quietly relying on a handful of unglamorous services that route your packets to the right place: DNS to translate names into addresses, and BGP to figure out how to actually get there. When these systems break, or get attacked, the Internet doesn’t just slow down but stops working. For more than 25 years, NLnet Labs has been…
In April 2026, Canonical disclosed 44 CVEs in uutils, the Rust reimplementation of GNU coreutils that ships by default since 25.10. Most of them came out of an external audit commissioned ahead of the 26.04 LTS. I read through the list and thought there’s a lot to learn from it. What’s notable is that all of these bugs landed in a production Rust codebase, written by people who knew what they were…
Jon Gjengset is one of the most recognizable names in the Rust community, the author of Rust for Rustaceans , a prolific live-streamer, and a long-time contributor to the Rust ecosystem. Today he works as a Principal Engineer at Helsing, a European defense company that has made Rust a foundational part of its engineering stack. Helsing builds safety-critical software for real-world defense…
Rust adoption can be loud, like when companies such as Microsoft, Meta, and Google announce their use of Rust in high-profile projects. But there are countless smaller teams quietly using Rust to solve real-world problems, sometimes even without noticing. This episode tells one such story. Cian and his team at Cloudsmith have been adopting Rust in their Python monolith not because they wanted to…
If you are responsible for software that powers critical infrastructure, handles sensitive data, or ships to customers in regulated markets, you have to pay attention to the regulations forming around software security. Governments around the world are converging on a single message: memory-unsafe code is a liability . New regulations, executive guidance, and procurement requirements are making it…
Space exploration demands software that is reliable, efficient, and able to operate in the harshest environments imaginable. When a spacecraft deploys a solar sail millions of kilometers from Earth, there’s no room for memory bugs, race conditions, or software failures. This is where Rust’s robustness guarantees become mission-critical. In this episode, we speak with Sebastian Scholz, an engineer…
Radar processes billions of location events daily, powering geofencing and location APIs for companies like Uber, Lyft, and thousands of other apps. When their existing infrastructure started hitting performance and cost limits, they built HorizonDB, a specialized database which replaced both Elasticsearch and MongoDB with a custom single binary written in Rust and backed by RocksDB. In this…
As we close the chapter on 2025 and celebrate our second year of ‘Rust in Production’, it’s time to reflect on the highlights of the 17 episodes since our last holiday special. We looked at Rust from all angles, from cloud infrastructure to embedded systems, and from robotics to satellite technology. One thing that all these stories have in common is the passion and dedication of the Rust…
Bringing Rust into the Linux kernel is one of the most ambitious modernization efforts in open source history. The Linux kernel, with its decades of C code and deeply ingrained development practices, is now opening its doors to a memory-safe language. It’s the first time in over 30 years that a new programming language has been officially adopted for kernel development. But the journey is far from…
What does it take to rewrite the foundational components of one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions? Ubuntu serves over 12 million daily desktop users alone, and the systems that power it, from sudo to core utilities, have been running for decades with what Jon Seager, VP of Engineering for Ubuntu at Canonical, calls “shaky underpinnings.” In this episode, we talk to Jon about the bold…
Creating a new programming language from scratch is a monumental undertaking. In this episode, we talk to Richard Feldman, creator of the Roc programming language, about building a language that is fast, friendly, and functional. We discuss why the Roc team moved away from using Rust as a host language and instead is in the process of migrating to Zig. What was the decision-making process like?…
I have a hobby. Whenever I see the comment // this should never happen in code, I try to find out the exact conditions under which it could happen. And in 90% of cases, I find a way to do just that. More often than not, the developer just hasn’t considered all edge cases or future code changes. In fact, the reason why I like this comment so much is that it often marks the exact spot where strong…
How do you build a system that handles 90 million requests per second? That’s the scale that Cloudflare operates at, processing roughly 25% of all internet traffic through their global network of 330+ edge locations. In this episode, we talk to Kevin Guthrie and Edward Wang from Cloudflare about Pingora, their open-source Rust-based proxy that replaced nginx across their entire infrastructure.…
Building autonomous robots that operate safely in the real world is one of the most challenging engineering problems today. When those robots carry sharp blades and work around people, the margin for error is razor-thin. In this episode, we talk to Andrew Tinka from Scythe Robotics about how they use Rust to build autonomous electric mowers for commercial landscaping. We discuss the unique…
The Rust community continues to grow, and with it, the number of conferences around the world. With the year well underway, most 2026 conferences have confirmed their dates, venues, and schedules, and the earlier events have already taken place. Come say hi if you see us at any of these events! (We’ll bring Rust in Production stickers.) Oh, and in case the call for proposals (CFP) is still open,…
Are you one of over 240 million subscribers of Amazon’s Prime Video service? If so, you might be surprised to learn that much of the infrastructure behind Prime Video is built using Rust. They use a single codebase for media players, game consoles, and tablets. In this episode, we sit down with Alexandru Ene, a Principal Engineer at Amazon, to discuss how Rust is used at Prime Video, the…
The phone buzzes at 3 AM. You roll out of bed, open your laptop, and see this in the logs: thread ' tokio - runtime - worker ' panicked at ' called ` Result :: unwrap ()` on an ` Err ` value : Error ( "data did not match any variant of untagged enum Customer at line 1 column 15" ) ', src/parsers/universal.rs:47:23 You open the codebase and find this: pub struct UniversalParser < T :…
It’s time for another recap including our highlights of Season 4. We’ve been at this for a while now (four seasons, and 32 episodes to be exact). We had guests from a wide range of industries: from Microsoft to Astral, and from password managers to satellite systems. This time, it’s all about using Rust for foundational software, which is software that is critical to a team or even an entire…
As a kid, I was always fascinated by space tech. That fascination has only grown as I’ve learned more about the engineering challenges involved in space exploration. In this episode, we talk to Vegard Sandengen, a Rust engineer at KSAT, a company that provides ground station services for satellites. They use Rust to manage the data flow from hundreds of satellites, ensuring that data is received,…
Handling secrets is extremely hard. You have to keep them safe (obviously), while at the same time you need to integrate with a ton of different systems and always provide a great user-experience, because otherwise people will just find a way around your system. When talking to peers, a lot of people mention 1Password as a company that nailed this balance. In today’s episode, I talk to Andrew…
Recently I was in need of a simple job queue for a Rust project. I already had Postgres in place and wondered if I could reuse it for this purpose. I found PGMQ by Tembo . PGMQ a simple job queue written in Rust that uses Postgres as a backend. It fit the bill perfectly. In today’s episode, I talk to Adam Hendel , the founding engineer of Tembo, about one of their projects, PGMQ, and how it came…
Ten years of stable Rust; writing this feels surreal. It’s only been yesterday that we all celebrated the 1.0 release of this incredible language. I was at Rust Week where Niko Matsakis gave his talk “Our Vision for Rust” in which he made a profound and insightful statement: Rust is a language for building foundational software . That deeply struck me. I highly recommend you read his blog post…
Few developers have been as influential to my career as Niko Matsakis. Of course he is a world-class engineer with a PhD from ETH Zürich, a Rust core maintainer who has been working on the language for way more than a decade, and a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS. But more importantly, he is an empathetic human and an exceptional communicator. I’ve personally been waiting for one year to get him…
The Rust standard library , affectionately called std , is exceptionally well-designed, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. More experienced Rust developers tend to navigate around some of its sharper parts. In this article, I want to highlight the areas in std that I personally avoid. Keep in mind that this list is subjective, so take it with a grain of salt. My intention is to point out some…
Some people learn new programming languages best by looking at examples for how to do the same thing they know in one language is done in the other. Below is a syntax comparison table which can serve as a quick reference for common C++ constructs and their equivalents in Rust. It is not a comprehensive guide, but I hope it helps out a C++ developer looking for a quick reference to Rust syntax.…
Up until a few years ago, Python tooling was a nightmare: basic tasks like installing packages or managing Python versions was a pain. The tools were brittle and did not work well together, mired in a swamp of underspecified implementation defined behaviour. Then, apparently suddenly, but in reality backed by years of ongoing work on formal interoperability specifications, we saw a renaissance of…
I see people make the same mistakes over and over again when learning Rust. Here are my thoughts (ordered by importance) on how you can ease the learning process. My goal is to help you save time and frustration. Let Your Guard Down Stop resisting. That’s the most important lesson. Accept that learning Rust requires adopting a completely different mental model than what you’re used to. There are a…
We don’t usually think much about Webhooks – at least I don’t. It’s just web requests after all, right? In reality, there is a lot of complexity behind routing webhook requests through the internet. What if a webhook request gets lost? How do you know it was received in the first place? Can it be a security issue if a webhook gets handled twice? (Spoiler alert: yes)
Victor Ciura is a veteran C++ developer who worked on Visual C++ and the Clang Power Tools. In this first episode of season 4, we talk to him about large-scale Rust adoption at Microsoft.
When people say Rust is a “safe language”, they often mean memory safety. And while memory safety is a great start, it’s far from all it takes to build robust applications. Memory safety is necessary but not sufficient for overall reliability. In this article, I want to show you a few common gotchas in safe Rust that the compiler doesn’t detect and how to avoid them. Why Rust Can’t Always Help…
Want to finally learn Rust? When I ask developers what they look for in a Rust learning resource, I tend to get the same answers: They want hands-on learning experiences They need content that’s applicable to their work They look for up-to-date material from experienced developers They prefer to use their own development environment All of the above are valid points, especially for learning Rust,…
You know the drill by now. It’s time for another recap! Sit back, get a warm beverage and look back at the highlights of Season 3 with us. We’ve been at this for a while now (three seasons, one year, and 24 episodes to be exact). We had guests from a wide range of industries: from automotive to CAD software, and from developer tooling to systems programming. Our focus this time around was on the…
I’ve been working with many clients lately who host their Rust projects on GitHub. CI is typically a bottleneck in the development process since it can significantly slow down feedback loops. However, there are several effective ways to speed up your GitHub Actions workflows! Want a Real-World Example? Check out this production-ready GitHub Actions workflow that implements all the tips from this…
It’s 2019, and Hubstaff ’s engineering team is sketching out plans for their new webhook system. The new system needs to handle millions of events and work reliably at scale. The safe choice would be to stick with their trusty Ruby on Rails stack – after all, it had served them well so far. But that’s not the path they chose. About Hubstaff Hubstaff helps distributed teams track time and manage…
The car industry is not known for its rapid adoption of new technologies. Therefore, it’s even more exciting to see a company like Volvo Cars embracing Rust for core components of their software stack.
Rust’s focus on expressions is an underrated aspect of the language. Code feels more natural to compose once you embrace expressions as a core mechanic in Rust. I would go as far as to say that expressions shaped the way I think about control flow in general. “Everything is an expression” is a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s a useful mental model while you internalize the concept. 1 But what’s so…
Programming is an iterative process. As much as we would like to come up with the perfect solution from the start, it rarely works that way. Good programs often begin as quick prototypes. While many experiments remain prototypes, the best programs can evolve into production code. Whether you’re writing games, CLI tools, or designing library APIs, prototyping helps tremendously in finding the best…
Web browsers today face increasing demands for both performance and privacy. At Brave, they’re tackling both challenges head-on with their Rust-based ad-blocking engine. This isn’t just about blocking ads – it’s about doing so with minimal performance impact while maintaining compatibility with existing filter lists and adapting to evolving web technologies.
While we try not to get too sentimental, celebrating one year of ‘Rust in Production’ alongside the holiday season feels like a perfect occasion to reflect. For this special episode of the podcast, we’ve gathered heartfelt messages from our guests to the Rust community. There are two common themes that run through these messages: The importance of writing simple, approachable Rust code to help…
