Season 4 Finale
2025-07-24 20 min
Description & Show Notes
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 organization. Rust is a great fit for this type of software!
We would like to thank the guests for their time and insights. We would also like to thank you, the listener for your support and feedback. Hosting and producing a podcast is a lot of work, but it’s worth it when we hear from you. Here’s to another great season!
We would like to thank the guests for their time and insights. We would also like to thank you, the listener for your support and feedback. Hosting and producing a podcast is a lot of work, but it’s worth it when we hear from you. Here’s to another great season!
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 organization. Rust is a great fit for this type of software!
We’ll take a break for the summer. In the meantime, we encourage you to catch up on any episodes you might have missed, and to check out the links below.
And if you’re interested in using Rust for your own projects, check out our dedicated learn page for additional content about Rust adoption or reach out to us directly for a chat.
Links From The Episode
- 10 Years of Stable Rust: An Infrastructure Story - Graydon Hoare’s reflection on Rust’s 10th anniversary
- Rust For Foundational Software - Matthias’ blog post on Rust’s role in foundational software
About Us
- Simon Brüggen (M3t0r) on GitHub
- Simon Brüggen (M3t0r) on Mastodon
- Matthias Endler on Mastodon
- About corrode Rust Consulting
- ‘Rust in Production’ Podcast on Apple
- ‘Rust in Production’ Podcast on Spotify
All Episodes of Season 4
If you missed any of the previous episodes, now is a great time to catch up:
- Episode 1: Microsoft with Victor Ciura
- Episode 2: Svix with Tom Hacohen
- Episode 3: Astral with Charlie Marsh
- Episode 4: Rust with Niko Matsakis
- Episode 5: Tembo with Adam Hendel
- Episode 6: 1Password with Andrew Burkhart
- Episode 7: KSAT with Vegard Sandengen
Credits
Podcast production by Simon Brüggen (M3t0r).
We would like to thank the guests for their time and insights. We would also like to thank you, the listener for your support and feedback. Hosting and producing a podcast is a lot of work, but it’s worth it when we hear from you. Here’s to another great season!
Transcript
Matthias: Another season done.
I truly can't believe how quickly
time has passed, and to some extent
that's a good thing because I truly
enjoyed this recent set of interviews.
It might have been my favorite one so far.
We saw a well-rounded group of Ians talk
about their experiences with the language
guests ranged from developer tooling with
estro over web backends with s vix, all
the way to operating systems and cloud
infrastructure with Microsoft, and
a truly inspirational interview with
Nico Makis from the Rust Core team.
In Nico's interview in particular,
which we recorded at Rust Week in the
Netherlands, he said something that
truly changed the way I see Rust.
He said that the goal of Rust is to
help build foundational software, and
that inspired me so much that I even
wrote an entire blog post about it.
I'm not gonna repeat everything
that I said in that blog post, and
I will link to it in the show notes.
but I wanted to take the opportunity to
reflect on the recent season in light of
this new understanding of the language.
First, let's hear it from Nico himself.
Niko: Foundational software.
It's the software that everybody
else builds on, and that could
be many different things, right?
I think sometimes that's like the
kernel that's very literally the
thing that everyone else runs on.
But other times it's a CLI tool
that's super widely used and it's
part of the scripting setup you use.
That kind of software has
particular characteristics.
It needs to be really reliable
because if it breaks everybody else's
stuff breaks, it needs to be fast
because everyone's building on it.
And so whatever performance hits you take
there, everybody has to to work with, and
it has this long-term maintenance story.
Matthias: Foundational software
is different from systems
programming software in a
sense that it's wider in scope.
What foundational software
is largely depends on the
organization writing the software.
It can be as varied as a package manager,
a storage layer, or a rust backend.
I think rust is excellent for this
type of work where correctness and
stability are of utmost importance
instead of following the worst better
approach that we know from systems like
Unix or other programming languages.
Rust is very much an MIT like language.
It wants you to do the right thing and
do the thing right, the right thing.
Designers are equally concerned
with simplicity, correctness,
consistency and completeness.
And I truly believe this
is where Ross is amazing.
In some of my consulting calls,
people ask me if Ross is the
right choice for their project.
It typically comes down to is the
software that you build foundational?
That means do you expect to
run it for many years to come?
Does it serve as a platform for other
tools and software in your organization?
Do you care about robustness,
stability, and long-term maintenance?
If you can answer all of these
questions with, yes, there's a
high chance that rust is indeed the
language that you're looking for.
But if you are just looking for a
quick solution or you want to build a
prototype or you care more about fast
results than a healthy co base, then Rust
might not be the right choice for you.
The companies that were
guests in the season all build
foundational software with frost.
Let's take one password, for example.
The core abstraction is to handle
passwords for millions of users, and
that definitely needs to be rock solid.
Undoubtedly, they build
foundational software.
Or take Ksat controlling hundreds
of satellites with rust or swix
handling millions of webhooks.
All of these things must not fail.
They must work with the highest
criticality, and I think that's what
Rust should focus on, , or at least focus
their marketing efforts on in the future.
But isn't foundation software
just systems programming?
I believe that systems programming has
its place, but the term is so overloaded
by now that it's lost much of its.
It's difficult to say that Rust
is a systems programming language
without being lumped into the
same category as c plus plus.
In that regard, I think systems
programming is also limiting.
It feels elitist somehow, whereas Rust
aims to be very inclusive and enables
everyone to learn how systems work.
Here's Charlie Marsh from
Astral, the team behind uv.
Charlie: I never considered myself to be
like a systems programmer, quote unquote.
In most of my career, I was
writing TypeScript Python.
I mean, I did some Java professionally,
but like I had never, except for like
a course in college done, NECI really
hadn't done DC plus plus and like
in the span of a few years, I like
learned to build this kind of software.
Matthias: And here's Andrew
Burkhart from One Password.
Andrew: I also have no
computer science background.
I was a construction worker before,
and I worked at, you know, a
drugstore before I became a developer.
So I had no idea about
binary trees and sorting.
I, I still really don't, to be honest,
but it's, rust has a way of bringing
those things out in you, which is hard at
first, but it also helps you to shore them
up because you see where your gaps are.
Matthias: People are able to do
systems level work without noticing.
Thanks to Rust.
They just learn things as they
go, and before they know it, they
manage to write critical software
components for their organizations.
Often without formal training,
while they can still be confident
that their code is memory safe.
And you know what's funny?
The way people see rust from
the outside is totally different
from what's actually happening.
People think it's this hipster language
that only hobbyists mess around with
on weekends, or they think it's some
over-engineered thing that only Google
and meta use for crazy complex stuff,
or that it's just an academic research
language, but that's just not true at all.
I see companies all over
the place using rust.
Small teams, big teams here
in Germany, everywhere.
They're solving real problems with it.
Let's hear from some of the
guests from this season about
how they use rust in production.
First, Nik Makis
Niko: Most people I talk to are not aware
of how much rust is in in production
at Amazon, like every S3 request.
Every EC2 VPC, you can tell my
ignorance of even our own product line.
Uh, uh, every lambda and vocation,
these things all go through rust.
They also go through other languages.
So I'm not saying that the exclusively
written in rust by any means, but
more and more the, the hot path of
a lot of these big services that
you know is, is being rewritten and
rust or re-architected and rust.
Matthias: Andrew Burkhard
out from one password.
Andrew: But there's, there's probably,
I think we have a couple hundred
developers now working across all the
different products that one password
and, you know, collide and Passage and
Trca and so forth have, but we probably
have, I don't know, I'd say a hundred
people that work pretty heavily in Rust
or, or, or maybe 50% or more in Rust.
Something like that.
Matthias: Charlie Marsh from Astro
Charlie: I think last I checked,
it's like a little over 12.5% of
all requests to the Python index
come from uv, which is like over 200
million requests a day, which is wild.
Right?
And you know, I spend a lot of
my time talking to companies.
There are tons of like 1 billion, 10
billion, even a hundred billion dollar
companies that are using this thing in
production and have been for a long time.
Matthias: Victor URA from Microsoft.
Victor: I think we reached an inflection
point in the company where it's sort
of we're all in on rust, as in we're
committed to being, making rust succeed
at Microsoft because we've seen so many
successes in various projects and teams
are no longer sort of treating it as
a hobby experiment to happy accident
that this thing works great in rust.
Matthias: Not everything
has to be webscale, though.
It's not just systems programming either.
This encouragement and its inclusivity
is what makes the community so great.
And as someone who's part of the Rust
community, you should also reflect
those values and be supportive of
newcomers on their journey to discover
their true potential with frost
as Adam Handel from Timbo noticed.
The developer experience is
great at any scale, you can just
start small and grow from there.
Adam: Yeah.
Most of, most of the time, if I'm
building a web server today, I, I'll
just grab aps and, and run with it.
You know, if I'm working with Data
and Postgres, I'm gonna grab SQL X.
10 years ago it would've been like
flask or Fast API, or maybe not 10
years ago for Fast API, but you know,
I have the equivalent of everything
that I would, you know, five years ago
would've gone to something in Python.
I have, you know, for me,
I like, I'd just pick rust.
It's just easier.
It's a better experience.
Matthias: Developer experience is not
just about the language itself, but also
about the tooling and the ecosystem.
Rust has cargo, which is a game changer.
Adam: I came from Python and it was
like, how do I get my environment
set up to, to run my application?
And at the time it was
like, do I use virtual end?
Do I use poetry?
Do I just install everything with pip?
You know, it's just, it's a mess.
Like there's some projects that are
making it better in Python today,
like UV is doing a really great job
cleaning up that, solving that problem.
But when I was learning Rust, it
was like, Hey, how do I run this?
How do I run this application?
Oh.
Cargo run.
That's it.
You know, how do I test it?
Cargo test, you know, it,
uh, it was just so intuitive.
Matthias: And once you get the
hang of it, you can build really
powerful stuff really quickly.
Suddenly you find yourself writing
extensions for your database in no time.
Adam: To go from like nothing to a
Hello World example, it was like an
hour or less to create an extension
that, you know, you write some function
in rust turn that function into a
SQL function that you could call.
That was like super easy.
So it was kind of, you know, like we
didn't have to, it it, we were, we
were up and running really quickly.
Matthias: Adam's journey is not unheard
of in the Russ community, and all of
this is to prove that Rust is enabling
people to reach further, further
than they themselves thought possible.
You can build stuff that you never
thought you could build before,
and that's what I love about Rust.
If you're an old timer, you might
still remember the great series
of blog posts about rust being
like a fire flower or a chat pack.
something that sort of unreasonably
makes you extremely powerful.
Here's Charlie Marsh
Charlie: I do feel like I'm constantly
guided by the compiler, and actually more
and more I think the way I write code is
that I try and make it such that I will
be guided by the compiler in the future.
Matthias: and here's Tom Koen from svi.
Tom: I think rust really got it
right, uh, in the, in how to do error
propagation, which is, you don't, you
can't just like willingly throw random
exceptions all the way up to the stack.
Like you have to catch them at every step
and define the, you know, like properly
define the, the signature and kind of like
the contract that you have with the color.
And with rust, you spend more in the
beginning, but actually that then later
on you don't have to spend as much energy.
Uh, and I think now we move fast.
Matthias: And that metaphor still
holds true today, but I think there's
something deeper going on when you
look at all the companies I talked to
in this season, they're not just using
rust to feel powerful or to show off.
they're using it because they
need something that's going
to last something reliable.
Gradin wrote a nice blog post about
10 years of stable rust, and I
highly recommended in this post.
He also talks about rust for writing
software that underpins other software,
and I think that's the thing about Rust.
It's really a language for decades when
you're building foundational systems,
you're betting that this stuff is going to
pay off in the long run that organizations
and society will benefit from what
you're building for decades to come.
We are building systems that people
will use every day and they might
not even know they're using them,
but they still depend on them.
That's what critical
software is all about.
Here's Tom Hackman
Tom: So really I think when it comes
to infrastructure, like really the
best you can do, even if you do
everything perfect is just have a
neutral effect on your customers.
Your customers won't notice that
you spend all of this time on it.
So, and this is part of what we hope you
do to do, is really just like give your
customers a state of the art experience.
They don't think about it, they
don't worry about, it just works.
And for you, you don't have to maintain
it and worry about any of that.
, Matthias: and Ru lets you do all
this with really great ergonomics.
for example.
Let's hear it from Virga,
sanding in from Ksat.
Vegard: The one thing I miss every time I
go to any other language is just the enum.
I think this I could model very
well in an enum, and I don't have
this capability and it saddens me.
Matthias: It's like Ru took the pragmatism
from c plus plus and the Purism from
Hasco you can build software that's
sustainable, that doesn't waste resources
where precision and correctness actually
matter stuff that works across different
languages and up and down the stack.
Vegard: So we are resource constrained
in the fact that we don't want to
overprovision every data center around
the world near to all our antennas on
our ground station sites, because first
of all, we don't necessarily have the
resources to do that, and we don't have
the ability to do it at some point.
So it's nice to use something that
doesn't hogg all the resources
. Matthias: I don't want to dwell
on it for too long, but have
you heard that rust is fast?
I mean really fast.
The fastness itself is not the
point, but the fact that it
allows you to run more with less.
You can run fewer instances of
your service, which means fewer
servers, which means typically
less ops work and therefore less
money spent on infrastructure.
The numbers keep coming in and
they always tell the same story.
Let's hear it from Tom.
Tom: I think it was, I don't remember
the exact numbers, but like, I think
it was like probably 40 x or something.
The difference between like the amount
of Python runners that we ha needed
to run compared to the rust ones.
And the thing about that is
that it actually compounds.
So if you go from, let's even go for
the basic, uh, case of just like two
rust runners and like 80 Python ones.
All of a sudden, like the
two runners, they hit.
In memory cache like all the time
because there's just two of them, right?
So let's say 50% of the time, but probably
more than 50% because like the moment
they flip it gets to the other one.
That one now has it cached.
So like in-memory caching is
actually extremely effective.
Matthias: If you've ever worked
with a larger c plus plus code base,
you know how hard it is to refactor
the spooky action at a distance.
The fear of breaking something, the lack
of confidence that you actually did it,
rust changes that if it compiles, it runs.
And that gives you a level of confidence
that you just don't get with C or c plus.
Plus,
in rust.
You can refactor with ease knowing that
the compiler will catch your mistakes.
Here's V Guard.
Vegard: Youngs ago, I was a c and
c plus plus developer, and I did a
bit of that and bit of that and just
trying to refactor a c plus plus
code base and having confidence that
you've actually done it correctly.
I have never had that, but trust like
the, it's, if it compiles, it works.
It basically is that.
Matthias: I believe rust
is a language for decades.
A language which allows us to build
software that lasts software that
doesn't need constant handholding and
doesn't go belly up when we stop looking
. Again, I fully agree with Viot
here when he shares his experience
with a critical service at Ksat,
Vegard: I have a good
example of that because.
A couple of months back, we needed
to do some changes in a few of our
services running, and I went into the
repository for that service to actually
fix it, and I saw the last commit was
one and a half year ago, and it's just
been running one and a half years.
I haven't touched it and I have never had
that experience in my professional career.
That service was the main.
Authentication authorization service
that authenticated and managed
every API key, uh, principle.
So it'll used on every request.
It's really chugging along,
so it's, it's amazing.
Matthias: 10 years of rust.
It's surreal how much we have
accomplished in such a short time.
Well short for a new
programming language, at least
rust has come a long way.
The community is strong.
The ecosystem's growing, and
the language is maturing.
It's exciting to see where Rust
will go in the next 10 years.
I think there's still a lot of work to do
around using rust to its full potential.
Now that we have a stable language and a
solid ecosystem, we can focus on design
patterns and best practices . For example,
how do you structure code and how do you
work with very large rust code bases?
Here's Andrew again,
Andrew: So we are, I think I just
looked the other day and we were at
like five or 600,000 lines of rust in
the core across like 600 ish crates.
I think we're just shy of 600
crates, internal plus dependencies.
So it's, it's a pretty big code base.
Right.
And like I said, that that core
makes up as much of the business
logic as we can get it to.
What we found teaching people is the
issue is not learning the rust syntax.
It tends to be that rust, good rust
requires a bit of engineering knowledge,
and that's not maybe engineering
knowledge that the book is covered.
Right.
And you and I talked about
this a little bit, right?
Like, how do I know
when I make a new crate?
Well, the Rust book doesn't, I mean,
it's not gonna tell you that that's
not really a rust problem, right?
That's a, your code based problem.
It's an engineering problem.
Matthias: Here's Victora from Microsoft.
Victor: We have hard data that shows
that components that have been rewritten
are much solid, much more solid, and we
can actually even formally prove some
of them that to be memory safe, both in
terms of spatial and temporal safety.
So it's the no bullshit about it.
It's literally what we're calling
it inside, at least on my team.
Who's responsible to drive.
This is 2025 is the year of Microsoft,
uh, the year of Frost at Microsoft.
So literally, this is
what we're calling it.
Matthias: I want to end this season
with words from Nico that capture
both what makes Rust special and
what makes the community great.
Niko: So the fact that Rust has
versatile enough, versatile enough
to be optimized for those sort of
foundational low level applications and
yet be usable all the way up is pretty
important and a little surprising.
I think a cool, a cool outcome.
Matthias: And finally,
his message to all of us.
Niko: Yeah, be excellent to each other.
I think Bill and Ted put it best
and I can't do better than that.
Matthias: I want to thank all
the guests who took the time to
share their experiences with Rust
I learned a lot from each of you,
and I hope our listeners did too.
And I also want to thank you, the listener
for tuning in and supporting the podcast.
Your feedback and encouragement
is what keeps us going.
We don't say this often, but if
you enjoyed this season, please
consider leaving a review on
your favorite podcast platform.
It really helps us reach more
people and share our passion for us.
And perhaps you have a colleague or a
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podcast, maybe you can send them your
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And finally, a heartfelt thanks to Simon
who tirelessly works in the background
and is the only reason why you can
even enjoy listening to this podcast.
And with that, thanks for
listening to Rust in Production.
Rust In Production is
a podcast by Corrode.
It is hosted by me.
Mattias Andler, and
produced by Simon Bruen.
For show notes, transcripts, and to learn
more about how we can help your company,
make the most of Rust visit corrode Dev.