Rising with Dylan Brown

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 CloudsmithMade 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 ButlerCian 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 EpisodeLee 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 Monolith - Martin Fowler's canonical explanationJaeger - "Debugger" for microservicesPyO3 - Rust-to-Python and Python-to-Rust FFI crateorjson - Pretty fast JSON handling in Python using Rustdrf-orjson-renderer - Simple orjson wrapper for Django REST FrameworkRust in Python cryptography - Parsing complex data formats is just safer in Rust!jsonschema-py - jsonschema in Python with Rust, mentioned in the PyO3 docsWSGI - Python's standard for HTTP server interfacesuWSGI - A application server providing a WSGI interfacerustimport - Simply import Rust files as modules in Python, great for prototypinggranian - WSGI application server written in Rust with tokio and hyperhyper - HTTP parsing and serialization library for RustHAProxy - Feature rich reverse proxy with good request queue supportnginx - Very common reverse proxy with very nice and readable configlocust - Fantastic load-test tool with configuration in Pythongoose - Locust, but in RustPodman - Daemonless container engineDocker - Container platformbuildx - Docker CLI plugin for extended build capabilities with BuildKitOrbStack - Faster Docker for Desktop alternativeRust in Production: curl with Daniel Stenberg - Talking about hyper's strictness being at odds with curl's permissive designaxum - Ergonomic and modular web framework for Rustrocket - Web framework for RustOfficial LinksCloudsmith WebsiteCian Butler's WebsiteCian's E-Mail

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.