Rust in Production

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 navigation, refactoring, debugging, testing, and large codebases. This episode is about where Rust fits into that world. We talk about why JetBrains does not plan to rewrite the IntelliJ platform in Rust, why Fleet used Rust for its File System Daemon, how Air builds on parts of Fleet's architecture, and why JetBrains prefers out-of-process Rust helpers over JNI inside the JVM. We also get into RustRover's internals: PSI, THIR, MIR-based expression evaluation in the debugger, procedural macro sandboxing, library stubs, parser regression testing, cargo-nextest support, and the practical trade-offs between JetBrains' indexing model and rust-analyzer's Salsa-based approach.

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.  My guests are Rebecca Rumbul, Executive Director and CEO of the Rust Foundation, Lori Lorusso, Director of Outreach at the Rust Foundation, and David Wood, Principal Software Engineer at Arm, Compiler Team Co-Lead in the Rust Project, and a Rust Foundation board member. Together we talk about the practical side of ecosystem stewardship: infrastructure, security, interop, maintainer support, governance, corporate membership, open-source funding, and the pressure new technologies like AI put on language ecosystems. 

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 from an angle of being the person who signs off on using Rust for a new project. For Dylan, it's about what Rust enables: lower compute costs, boring deployments, painless refactors, and code reviews that focus on business logic instead of null checks.

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 has to be reproducible and FIPS compliant? In today's episode, we get into the messy, interesting reality. We talk about the question of whether the hardest part is Rust the language or Rust the ecosystem. My guests come at this from two very different angles. Alexey Milovidov is the creator of ClickHouse and its CTO. He started the project back in 2009 and has spent decades thinking about performance, correctness, and what it actually takes to build a production database. Austin Bonander is a Senior Software Engineer at ClickHouse and a renowned open-source maintainer of sqlx. He works close to the Rust tooling and the CLI. Together we talk about where Rust fits inside a C++ monolith, what it would take for Rust to earn a rewrite of core components, supply-chain and compliance headaches, and whether Rust is heading for the same accumulation of regrets that every "trendy" language eventually accumulates.

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 cameras that record and analyze sports matches, from grassroots football pitches to professional clubs, and then turn hours of raw footage into something coaches and players can actually use: automatic highlights, player tracking, and match analysis. To get there, they have to capture panoramic video on a custom camera, follow the action without an operator, and crunch an enormous amount of data, reliably and at scale. My guests sit on both sides of that interface. Anders Hellerup Madsen works close to the metal on the camera itself, on the embedded firmware and the GStreamer media pipeline that turns raw sensor data into video. Gorm Casper works further up the stack, on the backend that ingests, processes, and analyzes those matches in Rust. Together we talk about where Rust fits across that whole journey, the trade-offs of doing media and computer vision work in a systems language, and what convinced a sports-tech company to bet on Rust for the parts that absolutely cannot fall over.

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 ambassador for the kernel, and Alice Ryhl, core maintainer of Tokio and one of the driving forces behind Rust for Linux at Google. I have to admit a bit of personal history here: I first wrote about Greg more than 20 years ago for the German online newspaper Pro-Linux. Getting to sit down with him, and with Alice, in front of a live audience to talk about how Rust is reshaping the most important piece of infrastructure on the planet, was a genuine career highlight. We get into the big questions: Why does Alice believe that interop, not rewrites, is how Rust wins inside Linux? How do you carefully weave in Rust while maintaining a 35-million-line C codebase? And what does it actually feel like, day to day, to write kernel code in Rust? “Rust is gonna save the Linux kernel.” — Greg Kroah-Hartman

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 one of the small, non-profit teams keeping that core infrastructure running. Their software, including the DNS servers NSD and Unbound, the RPKI tools Krill and Routinator, and the new DNSSEC signer Cascade, is deployed everywhere from hobbyist Pi-Hole setups to Let's Encrypt and major Internet operators. And increasingly, it's written in Rust! In this episode, I talk to Arya Khanna and Martin Hoffmann from NLnet Labs about what it takes to maintain critical Internet infrastructure as a small team, why they bet on Rust for new projects like the domain crate and Cascade and what the rest of us can learn from a codebase whose users include the people who keep your routes flowing.

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 applications, where correctness, performance, and reliability are non-negotiable. In this episode, Jon talks about what it means to build mission-critical systems in Rust, why Helsing bet on Rust from the start, and what lessons from his years of Rust education have shaped the way he writes and thinks about production code.

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 rewrite everything in Rust, but because Rust extensions were simply best-in-class for the specific performance problems they were trying to solve in their Django application. As they had these initial successes, they gained more confidence in Rust and started using it in more and more areas of their codebase. About Cloudsmith Made with love in Belfast and trusted around the world. Cloudsmith is the fully-managed solution for controlling, securing, and distributing software artifacts. They analyze every package, container, and ML model in an organization's supply chain, allow blocking bad packages before they reach developers, and build an ironclad chain of custody. About Cian Butler Cian is a Service Reliability Engineer located in Dublin, Ireland. He has been working with Rust for 10 years and has a history of helping companies build reliable and efficient software. He has a BA in Computer Programming from Dublin City University. Links From The Episode Lee Skillen's blog - The blog of Lee Skillen, Cloudsmith's co-founder and CTODjango - Python on RailsDjango Mixins - Great for scaling up, not great for long-term maintenanceSBOM - Software Bill of MaterialsMicroservice vs Monoli...

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 at Gama Space, a French company pioneering solar sail and drag sail technology for spacecraft propulsion and deorbiting. We explore how Rust is being used in aerospace applications, the unique challenges of developing software for space systems, and what it takes to build reliable embedded systems that operate beyond Earth's atmosphere.

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 episode, we dive deep into the technical journey from prototype to production. We talk about RocksDB internals, finite-state transducers, the intricacies of geospatial indexing with Hilbert curves, and why Rust's type system and performance characteristics made it the perfect choice for rewriting critical infrastructure that processes location data at massive scale.

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 community to build faster, safer, and more reliable software. In this special episode, we look back at some of the memorable moments from the past year and celebrate Rust's achievements. This goes beyond the case studies we've covered; it's about the Rust community as a whole and the state of the Rust ecosystem at the end of 2025.

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 straightforward. In this episode, we speak with Danilo Krummrich, Linux kernel maintainer and Rust for Linux core team member, about the groundbreaking work of integrating Rust into the Linux kernel. Among other things, we talk about the Nova GPU driver, a Rust-based successor to Nouveau for NVIDIA graphics cards, and discuss the technical challenges and cultural shifts required for large-scale Rust adoption in the kernel as well as the future of the Rust4Linux project.

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 decision to "oxidize" Ubuntu's foundation. We explore why they're rewriting critical components like sudo in Rust, how they're managing the immense risk of changing software that millions depend on daily, and what it means to modernize a 20-year-old operating system without breaking the internet.

Building 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 functional 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? What can Rust learn this decision? And how does Zig compare to Rust for this kind of systems programming work?

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. We'll find out why they chose Rust for mission-critical systems handling such massive scale, the technical challenges of replacing battle-tested infrastructure, and the lessons learned from "oxidizing" one of the internet's largest networks.

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 challenges of robotics software, why Rust is an ideal choice for cutting-edge safety-critical systems, and what it takes to keep autonomous machines running smoothly in the field.

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 challenges they face in building a global streaming service, and the benefits of using Rust for their systems.

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!

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, processed, and stored efficiently. This data is then made available to customers around the world, enabling them to make informed decisions based on real-time satellite data. We dive deep into the technical challenges of building reliable, high-performance systems that operate 24/7 to capture and process satellite data. Vegard shares insights into why Rust was chosen for these mission-critical systems, how they handle the massive scale of data processing, and the unique reliability requirements when dealing with space-based infrastructure. From ground station automation to data pipeline optimization, this conversation explores how modern systems programming languages are enabling the next generation of space technology infrastructure.

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 Adam Hendel, the founding engineer of Tembo, about their project, PGMQ, and how it came to be. We discuss the design decisions behind job queues, interfacing from Rust to Postgres, and the engineering decisions that went into building the extension.

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.

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 new ideas in the Python ecosystem. It started with Poetry and pipx and continued with tooling written in Rust like rye, which later got incorporated into Astral. Astral in particular contributed a very important piece to the puzzle: uv – an extremely fast Python package and project manager that supersedes all previous attempts; For example, it is 10x-100x faster than pip.  In this episode I talk to Charlie Marsh, the Founder and CEO of Astral. We talk about Astral’s mission and how Rust plays an important role in it.

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) Today I sit down with Tom from Svix to talk about what it takes to build an enterprise-ready webhook service. Of course it's written in Rust.

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. Victor works as a Principal Engineer on the Rust team in Microsoft's Developer Division, building the compiler toolchain and libraries needed for the broader Rust efforts across the organization. He is a regular speaker at conferences like CPPCon and also spoke at EuroRust 2024. We talk about Microsoft's first steps with Rust, widespread implementation across key products and services, and Hyrum's Law.

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 technical details of Rust in production, especially integration of Rust into existing codebases and ecosystem deep dives. Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey last season, which helped us dial in our content. Let us know if we hit the mark or missed it! For the future, we hope to present an even more diverse set of guests and topics. If you have any suggestions, please reach out! We'll be back in April. In the meantime, check out our dedicated learn page for additional content about Rust adoption.

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. We talked to Julius Gustavsson, System Architect at Volvo Cars, about the use of Rust for their Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in Volvo's EX90 and Polestar 3 models and how they are building a Rust ecosystem within the company.

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.

Think about this: software engineers have modern code editors, parallel processing, continuous integration, and countless tools that make their work efficient. But hardware engineers? They're often working with single-threaded tools, limited automation, and workflows that haven't fundamentally changed in decades. Zoo is building the infrastructure to change that, creating a modern set of tools and APIs that will allow companies and engineers to build better hardware design tools and accelerate the development of physical products. Today we're joined by Jessie Frazelle, CEO of Zoo (formerly KittyCAD), to talk about migrating core parts of Zoo's infrastructure to Rust, boring infrastructure, how Rust can help bridge the gap between software and hardware development, and how Zoo is building the foundation for the next generation of hardware development tools.

Version control is a critical part of any modern software project and git is the most popular tool for the job. But it can be complex and confusing, especially for beginners. The team behind GitButler believes there is a better way. They are building a modern Git client that streamlines the process of managing branches, backing up your work, and more. We hear from co-founders Scott Chacon and Kiril Videlov about how they're making Git easier for everyone -- all without sacrificing the power and flexibility that makes Git so popular in the first place.

What's even cooler than writing your own text editor or your own operating system? Building your own hardware from scratch with all the software written in Rust -- including firmware, the scheduler, and the hypervisor. Oxide Computer Company is one of the most admired companies in the Rust community. They are building "servers as they should be" with a focus on security and performance to serve the needs of modern on-premise data centers. In this episode, I talk to Steve Klabnik, a software engineer at Oxide and renowned Rustacean, about the advantages of building hardware and software in tandem, the benefits of using Rust for systems programming, and the state of the Rust ecosystem.

Picture this: Your organization's data infrastructure resembles a busy kitchen with too many cooks. You're juggling Kafka for messaging, Flink for processing, Spark for analytics, Airflow for orchestration, and various Lambda functions scattered about. Each tool excellent at its job, but together they've created a complex feast of integration challenges. Your data teams are spending more time managing tools than extracting value from data. InfinyOn reimagines this chaos with a radically simple approach: a unified system for data streaming that runs everywhere. Unlike traditional solutions that struggle at the edge, InfinyOn gracefully handles data streams from IoT devices to cloud servers. And instead of cobbling together different tools, developers can build complete data pipelines using their preferred languages - be it Rust, Python, or SQL - with built-in state management. At the heart of InfinyOn is Fluvio, a Rust-based data streaming platform that's fast, reliable, and easy to use.

Next to writing their own operating system, another dream shared by many developers is building their own text editor. Conrad Irwin, a software engineer at Zed, is doing just that. Zed is a fully extensible, open-source text editor written entirely in Rust. It's fast, lightweight, and comes with excellent language support out of the box. In the first episode of the third season, I sit down with Conrad to discuss Zed's mission to build a next-generation text editor and why it was necessary to rebuild the very foundation of text editing software from scratch to achieve their goals.

As we approach the finale of our second season, it's time for another recap. Could we shed some light on the current state of Rust's usage in the industry? What has changed in our perception of Rust in production since our last season? While more companies started to embrace Rust, some of the magic of Rust's early days is gone. I expect more ripple effects as the community clashes with the industry's demands. This episode takes on a more somber tone, as we peer into the massive tech debt we have accumulated as an industry. And in the dark: a faint glow, a narrow golden path that points us towards a more hopeful future.

Many devs dream of one day writing their own operating system. Ideally in their favorite language: Rust. For many of us, this dream remains just that: a dream. Jeremy Soller from System76, however, didn't just contribute kernel code for Pop!_OS, but also started his own operating system, RedoxOS, which is completely written in Rust. One might get the impression that he likes to tinker with low-level code! In this episode of Rust in Production, Jeremy talks about his journey. From getting hired as a kernel developer at Denver-based company System76 after looking at the job ad for 1 month and finally applying, to being the maintainer of not one but two operating systems, additional system tools, and the Rust-based Cosmic desktop. We'll talk about why it's hard to write correct C code even for exceptional developers like Jeremy and why Rust is so great for refactoring and sharing code across different levels of abstraction.

Rust can run everywhere, and by everywhere, we don't just mean on all operating systems, but also in all kinds of harsh environments: from the depths of the ocean to the vastness of space. Today we talk to a company that is using Rust to conquer the air. Fusion Engineering is building drone control systems for the next generation of drones. Jakub Valtar walks us through how Fusion Engineering came to use Rust as the foundation of their company. He explains why Rust is the safest choice for building drone control systems and what it takes to get into drone development.

It has become a trope by now: "Cars are computers on wheels." In modern cars, not only the infotainment system but also the engine, brakes, and steering wheel are controlled by software. Better make sure that software is safe. Alexandru Radovici is a Software Engineer at OxidOS, a company that builds a secure, open-source operating system for cars built on Rust and Tock. We talk about the challenges of certifying Rust code for the automotive industry and the new possibilities with Rust-based car software.

The idea of smart robots automating away boring household chores sounds enticing, yet these devices rarely work as advertised: they get stuck, they break down, or are security nightmares. And so it's refreshing to see a company like Matic taking a different approach by attempting to build truly smart, reliable, and privacy-respecting robots. They use Rust for 95% of their codebase, and use camera vision to navigate, vacuum, and mop floors.I sit down with Eric Seppanen, Software Engineer at Matic, to learn about vertical integration in robotics, on-device sensor processing, large Rust codebases, and why Rust is a great language for the problem space.

There are probably only a handful of open-source projects that had a bigger impact on the world than Mozilla Thunderbird. The email client has been around for over two decades and has been a staple for many users (me included). Dealing with a legacy codebase that servers millions of users is no easy feat. The team at MZLA, a subsidiary of Mozilla, has been working hard to modernize the core of Thunderbird by writing new parts in Rust. In this episode, I talk to Brendan Abolivier, a software engineer at MZLA, about the challenges of working on a legacy codebase, the new Rust-based Exchange protocol support, which is the first new protocol in Thunderbird in over a decade, and the future of Thunderbird.

Imagine you're faced with the challenge to build a system that can handle billions of recyclable items per year with the goal of being better than a human at identifying what can be recycled. Material classification is a complex problem that requires a lot of data and a lot of processing power and it is a cutting-edge field of research. Carters Schultz and his colleagues at AMP chose Rust to build the core of this system -- and it worked "shockingly well". In this interview, Carter, charismatic and witty, shares his experience of getting your hands dirty with Rust, and building a cutting-edge production-ready system, which can be now replicated across the world.

In the season premier we talk to none other than Daniel Stenberg! We focus on integrating Rust modules in curl, their benefits, ways in which Rust and Rust crates helped improve curl, but also how curl helped those crates, and where curl is used in the official Rust toolchain. Along the way we also learn about the early history of curl and Rust, which section of your car's owner's-manual you should "re"-read, some weird HTTP edge-cases, and Daniel's experience in open-source maintainership. And don't forget: have fun!

In this episode of Rust in Production, we reflect on the inaugural season, sharing insights from companies pioneering with Rust to shape the future of infrastructure. Starting with Rust's early days before the stable compiler, we chart the language's evolution and its growing adoption in production by leading companies. The episode explores why companies choose Rust, highlighting its unparalleled safety features, concurrency management, and performance that not only drives down costs but significantly enhances user experience. The narrative then shifts to the practicalities of adopting Rust, including learning resources, the importance of community support, and integrating Rust into existing codebases. We discuss the surprisingly positive experience of hiring Rust developers, thanks to the language's appealing prospects. Moreover, the episode delves into Rust's explicit approach to handling complexity, offering a steeper yet rewarding learning curve. We also address the misconception of Rust's limited adoption, revealing its widespread use across various industries and the consensus around certain Rust patterns and libraries. Despite the challenges in showcasing Rust's adoption due to the reticence of some companies to share their stories, the positive feedback from the podcast's audience underscores a keen interest in Rust's real-world applications. Concluding the season, we extend a heartfelt thanks to all guests and listeners, emphasizing the value of sharing Rust experiences and the potential for further growth in the Rust ecosystem. We share a wishlist for the Rust ...

In an ever-expanding world of microservices, APIs, and devices, maintaining an overview of application states and the myriad errors that can occur is challenging. For years, Sentry has been a go-to choice for developers to monitor their applications and receive notifications about issues within their code. Traditionally, Sentry was predominantly a Python shop, but they became one of the early adopters of Rust in their technology stack. They have been utilizing Rust for a few years now (since at least 2017), starting with sentry-cli, a command-line utility to work with Sentry, and continuing with their source map parsing pipeline, which reduced processing times from 20 seconds to less than 500 milliseconds. More recently, they have been developing two new projects in Rust: relay and symbolicator. Relay acts as a proxy for sending events to Sentry, while symbolicator is a service for handling the symbolication of stack traces. Both projects are open source and available on GitHub. Arpad Borsos (swatinem), Senior Native Platform Engineer at Sentry, sat down with me to discuss their journey with Rust and how it has enabled them to build a cutting-edge monitoring platform for large-scale applications. Our conversation covered topics such as 100x speedups, the Rust-Python interface, and the comparison between actor-based and task-based concurrency.

Have you ever wondered how computers stay in sync with the time? That is the responsibility of the Network Time Protocol (NTP). Around since 1985, NTP is one of the oldest protocols still in use on the internet and its reference implementation, ntpd, written in C, is still widely used today. That's a problem. C is a language that is not memory safe, and ntpd has had its share of security vulnerabilities. Here is a list of CVEs. As part of Project Pendulum, Folkert de Vries and his colleagues from Tweede Golf have been working on a Rust implementation of NTP. I sit down with Folkert to talk about the project, the challenges they faced, and the benefits of using Rust for this kind of project. Along the way, we learn about funding open source projects, the challenges of establishing a new implementation of a protocol, and all sorts of other interesting things that might or might not be related to NTP.

In this episode, we have Micah Wylde from Arroyo as our guest. Micah introduces us to Arroyo, a real-time data processing engine that simplifies stream processing for data engineers using Rust. They explain how Arroyo enables users to write SQL queries with Rust user-defined functions on top of streaming data, highlighting the advantages of real-time data processing and discussing the challenges posed by competitors like Apache Flink. Moving on, we dive into the use of Rust in Arroyo and its benefits in terms of performance and memory safety. We explore the complementarity of workflow engines and stream processors and examine Arroyo's approach to real-time SQL and its compatibility with Postgres. Micah delves into memory and lifetime concerns and elaborates on how Arroyo manages them in its storage layer. Shifting gears, we explore the use of the Tokyo framework in the Arroyo system and how it has enhanced speed and efficiency. Micah shares insights into the challenges and advantages of utilizing Rust, drawing from their experiences with Arroyo projects. Looking ahead, we discuss the future of the Rust ecosystem, addressing the current state of the Rust core and standard library, as well as the challenges of interacting with other languages using FFI or dynamically loading code. We touch upon Rust's limitations regarding a stable ABI and explore potential solutions like WebAssembly. We also touch upon industry perceptions of Rust, investor perspectives, and the hiring process for Rust engineers. The conversation takes us through the crates used in the Arroyo system, our ...

In this episode, Nicolas, a staff software engineer at Apollo GraphQL, discusses the company's use of GraphQL API technologies. Apollo GraphQL specializes in open-source libraries for both client and server-side applications, with a focus on integrating Rust into their main offerings: the Apollo router and GraphOS cloud. Nicolas explains how the Apollo router consolidates multiple microservices into a single API, efficiently routing requests to appropriate services. He delves into GraphQL's role as an effective query language for APIs, highlighting its ability to provide a comprehensive description of API data and its compatibility with existing data systems. The shift from the JavaScript-based Apollo Gateway to the Rust-based Apollo Router is a key topic, with an emphasis on the performance and safety improvements Rust brings to the table. The conversation covers the use of Rust for the router and GraphQL parser, alongside Kotlin for the management plane and GraphQL for the API. Challenges in stability and reliability are discussed, as well as Rust's advantages in safety and type system consistency. Nicolas shares insights on Async Rust, particularly its impact on productivity and application in CLI tools like Rover. The episode also addresses learning Rust in stages, from basic language concepts to advanced internal mechanisms. It touches on functional patterns in Rust and strategies for effective dependency management. Closing the discussion, Nicolas highlights the inclusive and supportive nature of the Rust community.

In this episode, we are joined by Steven, the CTO of PubNub, a company that has developed an edge net messaging network with over a billion connected devices. Steven explains that while message buses like Kafka or RabbitMQ are suitable for smaller scales, PubNub focuses on the challenges of connecting mobile devices and laptops at a web scale. They aim to provide instant signal delivery at a massive scale, prioritizing low latency for a seamless user experience. To achieve this, PubNub has architected their system to be globally distributed, running on AWS with Kubernetes clusters spread across all of Amazon's zones. They utilize GeoDNS to ensure users connect to the closest region for the lowest latency possible. Steven goes on to discuss the challenges they faced in building their system, particularly in terms of memory management and cleanup. They had to deal with issues such as segmentation faults and memory leaks, which caused runtime problems, outages, and potential data loss. PubNub had to invest in additional memory to compensate for these leaks and spend time finding and fixing the problems. While C was efficient, it came with significant engineering costs. As a solution, PubNub started adopting Rust, which helped alleviate some of these challenges. When they replaced a service with Rust, they observed a 5x improvement in memory and performance. Steven also talks about choosing programming languages for their platform and the difficulties in finding and retaining C experts. They didn't consider Java due to its perceived academic nature, and Go didn't make the li...

For our very first episode, we welcome a special guest, Paul Dix, the CTO of InfluxData. He starts by giving us an overview of InfluxDB, an open source time series database used by developers to track server and application data. He takes us back to the early days of InfluxDB and explains how it came into existence, starting with the challenges they faced with their initial SaaS application and how they made the decision to repurpose their infrastructure and create this open source database. Paul also sheds light on the popularity of the programming language Go, which had a significant influence on their decision to use it for their project. He takes us through the journey of InfluxDB's development and the improvements that have been made over the years. He emphasizes the enhancements made in versions 0.11 and 1.0 to improve performance and query capabilities. Moreover, he shares their decision to explore using Rust for certain parts of the project and the positive impact it has had. Moving forward, the conversation delves into the challenges of managing high volumes of data in time series databases. Paul talks about the solutions they implemented, such as using BoltDB and developing the time-structured merge tree storage engine. We then dive into the decision to rewrite InfluxDB in Rust and the benefits it offers. He explains the improved performance, concurrency, and error handling that Rust brings to the table. Paul goes on to discuss the development process and how the engineering team has embraced Rust across their projects. As the conversation progresses, we tou...

This is Rust in Production, a podcast about companies who use Rust to shape the future of infrastructure. We follow their journey in pursuit of more reliable and efficient software as they solve some of the most challenging technical problems in the world. I'm your host, Matthias Endler, and I'm a software engineer at corrode, a consultancy that helps companies make the most of Rust. I've been using Rust since 2015, have been a member of the Rust Cologne meetup since Rust 1.0 and ran a YouTube channel called "Hello Rust". There are plenty of great podcasts about Rust, but I felt that there was a missing piece. I wanted to hear more about how companies who use Rust in production. What are the challenges they face? How do they overcome them? What are the benefits of using Rust? How does the company find and hire Rust developers? And what advice would they give to other companies who want to use Rust. I sit down with decision-makers from companies that bet big on Rust and ask them in-depth questions about what they learned along the way.  New episodes air every two weeks on Thursdays at 4pm UTC. If you don't want to miss out, please subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps other people find the show and supports our work. If you want to learn more about the show, please visit corrode.dev/podcast. Stay tuned for the first episode, where I talk to Paul Dix from InfluxData about how they use Rust in the latest version of InfluxDB.