Ralf Jung on GhostCell and Working as a PL Researcher

This episode, we're joined by Ernest Kissiedu, who is the community lead of the Rust London user group as well as a co-founder of the DevX Initiative, which empowers current and would-be Rust contributors through research, workshops, and sponsorship.  Ernest tells the story of how he fell in love with Rust, how he got into organizing one of the largest local Rust user groups, as well as how he started the DevX Initiative. He also opens up about the challenges he faces running such a unique initiative, along with the possible shiny future of Rust that he hopes the DevX Initiative will help bring to fruition.  Blog post announcing that the DevX Initiative is now independent: https://medium.com/@thedevxinitiative/the-independent-devx-initiative-3aff64fcf3dc. You can find the DevX Initiative on Twitter @DevXInitiative. You can find the Rust London user group on Twitter @RustLondon_. You can send us an email at buildingwithrust AT gmail DOT com or find us in the Rustacean Station Discord server. Timestamps 00:26 - Welcome 00:35 - Ernest's intro 01:26 - How Ernest got into Rust 09:02 - Rust game development in the early days 11:46 - Rust's community is its most compelling feature  13:28 - Ernest's journey to becoming community lead of the Rust London user group 22:30 - How Ernest co-founded the DevX Initiative 29:00 - The DevX Initiative going independent 34:34 - DevX and the Rust Foundation are both working towards the same goal 38:00 - Ernest's personal projects 43:42 - Contributing in ways other than coding 48:16 - Widening the definition of what it means to be a 'contributor' 50:26 - Summarizing and wrapping up 53:41 - Ernest's sign-off 55:16 - Outro

Nick Cameron sat down to chat with us about his Rust journey, including his experiences working as a member of the Rust core team back in the language's pre-1.0 days. He left the core team and open source contributor-ship in 2019 due to his growing family, but has since returned to full-time open source work; he spends most of his time now consolidating the different pillars that make up Rust's async ecosystem. Through it all, he has learned how to effectively juggle open source work with his priorities as a parent and family man.  Nick's website is https://ncameron.org. You can follow him on Twitter @nick_r_cameron. The Rust 2021 annual survey results blog post: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2022/02/15/Rust-Survey-2021.html Nick's blog post on the portable and interoperable async Rust initiative: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/portable-and-interoperable-async-rust/ Nick's Rust in 2022 blog post: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/rust-in-2022-2/ You can send us an email at buildingwithrust AT gmail DOT com or find us in the Rustacean Station Discord server. Timestamps 1:09 - Nick's intro 2:04 - Nick's history with Rust 7:14 - Memories from working on Rust pre-1.0 8:48 - Dynamically-sized types have some rough edges 12:31 - Reflecting on the Rust core team 17:43 - The portable and interoperable async initiative 31:16 - How much should the Rust standard library support async programming? 35:47 - Returning to full-time open source work 46:08 - Juggling open source work and parenting 55:00 - Nick's sign-off 57:28 - Outro

We sat down with Josh Triplett, co-lead of the Rust Language team, to chat about his journey into Rust contributorship and what considerations he makes when iterating on a language as widely-used as Rust. We also discuss Josh's ideal build system, as well as what changes he thinks the Rust language and community need to make in order for Rust to stay relevant well into the future. If you're interested in finding out more about the build system Josh is building, head on over to https://buildit.dev. The Lang team's decision-making process is documented over at https://lang-team.rust-lang.org/decision_process.html. Josh's homepage is located at https://joshtriplett.org. You can find him on Twitter @josh_triplett. You can send us an email at buildingwithrust AT gmail DOT com or find us in the Rustacean Station Discord server. Timestamps 0:40 - Welcome 0:52 - Josh's intro 1:29 - How Josh is spending his days 3:05 - Josh's initial experiences playing with Rust 7:14 - How Josh got into contributing to Rust 8:42 - Explaining some of Rust's pre-1.0 features 11:43 - Why do some features get stabilized and others don't? 13:12 - Important language design considerations 17:42 - Most memorable moments working on the Lang team 23:45 - Difficulties to working on the Lang team 25:51 - How do you keep your Rust work sustainable? 30:30 - What are the most important things in Rust that need working on? 34:12 - Advice for those looking to do more high-impact but less visible work 37:21 - Writing code is not the only way to contribute to Rust 39:34 - Why build a new build system? 50:09 - Long-term changes to the Rust language and community you'd like to see 1:05:29 - What fictional world would Josh most like to visit? 1:11:58 - Josh's sign-off 1:13:15 - Outro

We chat with Leonora Tindall, one of the co-authors of the 2nd edition of Programming Rust, about her experiences working on the book, the various roles she has worked in using Rust, and about the state of academic computer science education.  Nora's blog can be found at https://nora.codes/. Her Twitter handle is @NoraDotCodes.  Visit https://play.google.com/store?code=3MNQ2X1ZPV6TT to receive 40% off the full price of Programming Rust 2nd Edition. You can send us an email at buildingwithrust AT gmail DOT com or find us in the Rustacean Station Discord server. Timestamps 0:40 - Welcome 1:12 - Nora's intro 1:58 - Thoughts on podcasts in the Rust community 4:12 - Are you ok with listening to your own recorded voice? 5:13 - Nora's work history 8:29 - Working on the second edition of Programming Rust 12:00 - Developing empathy as educators 15:40 - Keeping the Mandelbrot renderer project from the first edition 17:30 - Who should you buy the second edition of Programming Rust? 24:31 - Learning programming should be more fun 26:37 - Working on cancer discovery at CancerIQ 33:23 - Working on edge delivery at Fastly 35:18 - Being California transplants to the midwest 36:37 - Nora's unconventional college experience 37:58 - Shuffleboard as a team-building activity 38:45 - Thoughts on academic computer science education 49:12 - What fictional world would you most like to visit? 55:01 - Nora's sign-off 56:09 - Outro

We sat down with Ralf Jung who is, at the time of this recording, a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS). Ralf is part of the RustBelt project, which seeks to define and develop rigorous formal foundations for the Rust programming language.  We talked with Ralf about GhostCell, a technique for separating permissions from data in Rust that opens up possibilities and alternative strategies when it comes to working around Rust's "aliasing XOR mutability" rules, why there seems to be such a large gap between academic programming languages and "mainstream" programming languages, as well as what makes for a good PL researcher.  Ralf blogs about Rust, and other topics, at https://www.ralfj.de/blog/.  matthieu-m's Ghost Collections crate is referenced during the show and can be found at https://github.com/matthieu-m/ghost-collections. Send us an email at [email protected] to suggest cool people or projects in the Rust ecosystem you'd like us to have on the show! 

We talk to Tim McNamara, the author of the book Rust in Action and "New Zealand's Rust guy", about the wonders of New Zealand, the writing and publishing process for his book, and wrestling with impostor syndrome despite being a published Rust author.  Listen in for a special promo code to get a discount on Rust in Action! You can find Tim on Twitter @timClicks. A transcript for this episode is available at https://github.com/seanchen1991/building-with-rust/blob/main/transcripts/002.md. Send us an email at [email protected] to suggest cool people or projects in the Rust ecosystem you'd like to hear us chat with!

In our inaugural episode, we talk to Luca Palmieri who built Rust machine learning libraries including ndarray-stats and linfa. For his day job, he works on TrueLayer's PayDirect product, which is built top-to-bottom in Rust. Luca's current side project is writing Zero to Production, a guide on Rust backend development. You can find Luca on Twitter @algo_luca. A transcript for this episode is available at https://github.com/seanchen1991/building-with-rust/blob/main/transcripts/001.md. Send us an email at [email protected] to suggest cool people or projects in the Rust ecosystem you'd like to hear us chat with!