Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Rust is quietly spreading as a language of choice to build reliable and performant applications. But what makes it different? Alice Riel is a software engineer working on Google's Android Rust team, a core maintainer of Tokio, the de facto async runtime for Rust, and is a Rust language team advisor.
In today's conversation, we cover the pitch on why Rust is worth to consider whether you are using TypeScript or C++ today.
Chapter 2: What makes Rust different from other programming languages?
how concepts like ownership, the borrow checker, and the unsafe keyword work, and what are things that trip up newcomers to Rust, how the languages govern without a benevolent dictator, and how RFCs and additions work, and many more. If you want to understand what makes Rust different and why so many engineers say, once it compiles, it works, this episode is for you.
This episode is presented by Intesys. Verify your system's correctness without human review or traditional integration tests and avoid bugs or outages. This episode is brought to you by Sentry. Sentry is application monitoring software built by developers for developers.
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Sentry shows you the full context on issues, stack traces, user actions, environment details, and even the exact line of code that caused the issue. It supports pretty much every modern tech stack, TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, and others.
Chapter 3: How does memory safety work in Rust?
It works on backend, frontend, mobile, you name it. One new feature Sentry launched is Seer, their AI debugging agent. Let me show you. I open the Seer agent and ask about what are some repeated errors happening on my backend. Seer figures out that a repeated issue is a network call failure.
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Chapter 4: What is ownership and borrowing in Rust?
Check out Sentry at sentry.io slash pragmatic and start monitoring today. Alice, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's really nice to have you here. How did you get into software engineering?
Chapter 5: Why is the unsafe keyword important in Rust?
It actually all started with Minecraft.
No way.
I wanted to write my own mod for Minecraft, so I learned Java. I didn't get very far with the Minecraft modding, but that's where it started.
How did you continue?
Chapter 6: How does Rust's package manager, Cargo, function?
Did you go to university?
This was just before I started in high school. And then after high school, I had a year where I worked full time as a software engineer. And then I moved on to starting my bachelor.
Chapter 7: How is Rust governed and what are RFCs?
Did that for three years. And then I did a master's for two years.
How did you end up at Google? Was that straight out of university?
I actually started part-time at the same time as when I started my master's, and then I switched to full-time after I finished.
How did you get involved with the Rust community? Was it at Google? Was it before Google? Oh, way before. Way before.
I've been doing Rust for a long time. When I was in school, I spent a lot of time on what's called the Rust users forum. Well, I was answering questions, really. I have maybe 10,000 posts on there or something.
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Chapter 8: What is the process of contributing to Rust?
At some point, I also started being active in some... chat servers, the Discord server for something called Tokyo. I kept doing that, answering questions. When I saw common questions, I would fix the documentation. That's how I got into Tokyo, which I'm now one of the maintainers of.
And then for those of us not as familiar with Rust and Tokyo, what is Tokyo inside of Rust and why is it important?
So Tokyo is, well, it's an asynchronous runtime for Rust. You can think of it as the standard library for Rust when you're using async. I mean, if you compare with something like JavaScript in the browser, you might compare Tokyo with the browser itself. For example, in JavaScript, you have this loop.
this event loop, which has all the tasks that are able to run, and then they get executed one after the other. And especially if you use the await stuff, then you can have tasks pause, and then another task starts running on the same thread. And Tokyo does something similar. It has a queue of things that are able to run, and then it will run them.
So unlike JavaScript, Tokyo can be multi-threaded, so you can have multiple queues running in parallel.
This seems like a pretty core part of Rust as a language, as an ecosystem. How did you gravitate towards this? Because it sounded like you were, if I understand correctly, you were lurking on the Rust forums, you were helping out here and there. What drew you to this part of the language or the ecosystem, should I say?
I think part of what I liked about Rust is this feeling that as you write the code, when it compiles, it works. I mean, this has to be in quotes, right? Because obviously it's possible that there are bugs. But this is something a lot of people say about Rust, and there's a reason people say it, even though it's not necessarily literally true.
How do some other languages compare?
To begin with, I think to have a language that feels this way, you have to have a type system. That's where it all starts. I do think that even compared to other languages with type systems, I think Rust does a better job than many languages, even others with type systems. I mean, the classic example is Java's Null. It was Tony Herr.
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