• This Week in Rust 350

This Week in Rust 350

Nell Shamrell-Harrington: Hello Rustaceans! Welcome to another episode of This Week in Rust here on the Rustacean Station!

As always, I’m Nell Shamrell-Harrington, lead editor of This Week in Rust.

This episode covers issue number 352 of This Week in Rust, published on August 18, 2020.

After going through this week’s news, we will continue our interview series with speakers from the upcoming RustConf. This week we will hear from Harrison Bachrach, Esteban Kuber, and Jam. Each speaker will introduce themselves and give you a brief preview of their talk at the end of this episode.

Before we go into the news, I’d like to start off today’s podcast with a personal note. I am one of the 250 Mozillians who were laid off last week. While this was a shock, I have been deeply touched by the outpouring of support from the Rust community.

This Week in Rust, the newsletter, will definitely be continuing. However, this podcast will be taking a break for at least a few weeks. This is to give me some time to process this unexpected change in my life and to consider where I’d like my next role to be. I have greatly enjoyed recording this podcast and, depending on where I land, I hope to return to it in the future. Thank you again for all of your outreach and support, I cannot even begin to express how touching it has been and how deeply grateful I am. Truly, we are an incredible group of people.

Now, let’s start with the news.

The core team has released a new blog post titled “Laying the foundation for Rust’s future.” This post addresses some of the uncertainty and confusion in the Rust community after the Mozilla layoffs. It reassures the community that the Rust project will, indeed, continue. Additionally, it announces plans for establishing a Rust foundation - something I worked on while working at Mozilla and am thrilled I can finally talk about. A working group including members of the core team and few others - including myself - will be working together to have the first iteration of the foundation up and running by the end of the year. I can’t wait to see something that has been planned so long finally come together!

Ferrous systems has published another post in their “Learning Rust” series. The one is called “The Compiler is your Friend” and covers how you can use the Rust compiler as your personal mentor when learning core Rust concepts. I highly recommend it.

Have you found yourself wondering about using Rust to write embedded software? Henk Dieter’s post, “Why Rust is a great fit for embedded software” is a great place to start. Learn the basics of Rust on embedded systems and, in particular, useful crates for your embedded systems. Dieter will also teach you how to set up your development environment and create your first embedded program that will cause an LED light to blink.

Jam, whom you will hear an interview with later in this podcast, has written a post called “Why Rust’s Unsafe Works”. If you have spent much time in the Rust community, you may have heard someone say something along the lines of: “Sure, Rust is “safe”, but unsafe exists, and most of the standard library is unsafe!” Read the post to see how Jam debunks this view through discussing encapsulations and locality and how they work together.

Amos is back with a great post on the “Faster than lime” blog. This one discusses the process of learning Rust from the viewpoint of a Java, C#, C, or C++ developer. If your friends developing in those languages have questions about Rust, this post is a great one to send them.

If you are in the mood for a deep dive into Async programming, definitely check out Kirill Dubovikov’s post called “Async Unicorns love Rust”. Learn the why and the how of Async programming with Rust and, even if you feel you already know how to program asynchronously, it’s always good to review the concepts from another point of view.

Ryan Gorup - founder of Ebbflow - is back with another post about building Linux packages for Rust, in particular building them with GitHub Actions using Custom Actions and Docker Container Images. Check out the post for all of the information about building and hosting your build images, creating GitHub actions workflows, and more.

Moving onto RFCs, it’s been a quiet week for Rust RFCs this week. No RFCs were approved, no RFCs are in final comment period, and no new RFCs were proposed. That means this week is a great opportunity to catch up with the RFCs currently in progress, make sure to check out the Rust RFC GitHub repo, linked in the show notes.

As for upcoming events - the biggest one on my mind is RustConf, which comes to your screens this Thursday, August 20. I’m thrilled to be hosting it and I hope the interviews with the speakers you’ve heard over the past few weeks have helped you get excited about it as well. I can tell you firsthand how incredibly hard each of the speakers worked on their talks - they each did at least one run through with me, many did two, and a few even did three before finalizing their talk. I can’t wait for you to see their work!

As for other events, we have an online meetup coming up in Vancouver, BC and in person meetups in Dallas, Texas and Seol, South Korea.

And now, let’s move onto the final RustConf speaker interviews!

This week we hear from Harrison Bachrach, Esteban Kuber, and Jam.

First, let’s talk to Harrison Bachrach:

(Transcript of Harrison Bachrach interview to be added)

Now, let’s hear from Esteban Kuber:

(Transcript of Harrison Bachrach interview to be added)

And finally, let’s hear from Jam:

(Transcript of Jam interview to be added)

As a reminder, RustConf registration is still open and I hope to see you all there!

And that’s all for this week’s podcast, make sure to check out the full issue of This Week in Rust for even more fantastic Rust content.

This Week in Rust is edited by myself, Andre Bogus, and Colton Donnelly. This week’s contributors included, using their GitHub usernames: Jam1Garner, Darksonn, Hdoordt, Gorup, Ecstatic-morse, and Hmble.

As always, if you write a great article on Rust or happen to see one - please submit it to This Week in Rust by opening a pull request on our GitHub repo. Have a wonderful week everyone and please stay safe out there!