June 08, 2022

This Week in Rust - Issue 444

58 minutes

Highlights from This Week in Rust - Issue

444. This

week features a juicy post-mortem, open source, open hardware, and lots of news

from around the Rust ecosystem.

Contributing to Rustacean Station

Rustacean Station is a community project; get in touch with us if you’d like to suggest an idea for an episode or offer your services as a host or audio editor!

Twitter: @rustaceanfm

Discord: Rustacean Station

Github: @rustacean-station

Email: [email protected]

Timestamps & referenced resources

[@00:00] Welcome

[@00:10] - Introduction

[@00:50] - Agenda

[@01:23] - Quote of the week

This is the difference in approaches of the two languages. In C++ if the

code is vulnerable, the blame is on the programmer. In Rust if the code is

vulnerable, Rust considers it a failure of the language, and takes

responsibility to stop even “bad” programmers from writing vulnerable code.

I can’t stress enough how awesome it is that I can be a careless fool, and

still write perfectly robust highly multi-threaded code that never crashes.

[@03:09] Allen: Rust is both good and bad at marketing

[@03:30] - Crate of the week

[@04:15] - Tim and Sean discuss parsing in episode

2022-05-26 at 47:10

[@05:10] Official Notices

[@05:22] - Announcing Rust 1.61.0

Custom exit codes from main

[Note from Tim: I say “termination crate”, but should have said “Termination trait”.]

More capabilities for const fn

“Basic” handling of fn pointers

Add trait bounds to a const fn

dyn trait and impl Trait support

Stdio handles can be locked directly

Several stabilized APIs

[@08:07] Highlights

[@08:27] - Developer survey: JavaScript and Python reign, but Rust is rising

[@09:09] - Sean: “Rust adoption has nearly quadrupled in the last two years, going from

600k developers in Q1 2022 to 2.2m in Q1 2022.”

[@13:00] - Redust by Will Nelson

[@13:50] Allen: I think the comments are actually more interesting. They

are starting to point to something really—I don’t know whether it’s

good or bad for the community—where, you know, people start rolling

their own crates instead of, say, doing stuff upstream. It kind of goes back

to what Tim was complaining about before [Easy Mode for

Rust, discussed on This Week in Rust - Issue 441]—well, lightly

pointing out to people out there—that okay, now which crate should I

use?

[@16:20] Tim: Open source is really complicated. You need to talk to

people. That’s … challenging. [Laughs]

[@16:40] Josh Triplett on Building with

Rust,

discussing the orphan rule

[@16:50] Sean: Rust is not very good at sharing between crates.

[@19:07] - Rust: A Critical

Retrospective by bunnie

Links

The Hardware Hacker, bunnie’s autobiography

[video] “Shenzhen: An Alternative to the American way of

Innovation”

[@28:56] A Programmer’s Brain, by Felienne Hermans, about working memory

in programmers.

[@19:58] - Hacking the Xbox book

[@20:04] - [video] Linux.conf.au 2013

keynote

discussing Chumby and creating a hardware startup

[@20:20] - betrusted.io, a secure communications system that

runs the Xous microkernel operating system

[@21:07] - Tim: Security-critical applications have issues when they … rely on Rust.

There’s one quote I want to pull out of the post, which is: “I’m not sure

if there is even a good solution to this problem, but, if you are

super-paranoid and your goal is to be able to build trustable firmware, be

wary of Rust’s expansive software supply chain attack surface!”

[@26:09] - Sean: bunnie I think that you are absolutely, totally, qualified.

[@30:17] - Allen: I did see a macro that he put in there. … I forget

extact. It was very crazy and I was like, “Come on, no one’s every going to

write something crazy like this” and then I took a look at the RFC that

Sean’s gonna do and in the comments there was a crazy one like that and I

was like, “oh wow, this guy’s point’s valid”.

[@30:49] - Hyrum’s Law, named after Hyrum

Wright.

With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you

promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be

depended on by somebody.

[@31:50] Fixing memory leaks by Lily Mara

[@34:01] - tracing crate, created as part of

the tokio project

[@32:33] - “Is it possible to cause a memory leak in

Rust?” - Stack Overflow

[@33:06] -

std::ops::Drop trait

documentation

std::mem::forget and

Box::leak

for intentionally leaking memory

Out-of memory (OOM) killer internals page from the Linux memory

management wiki

[@37:54] tracing::instrument::Instrument trait, which fixes this issue

[@41:29] Building a Cloud Database from Scratch: Why We Moved from C++ to

Rust

by Yingjun Wu

GAT (generic associated traits)

Allen: [C++ vs Rust] is like apples vs apple pie.

[@45:50] - [video] Deref and Drop traits by Dan

Chiarlone

“Smart pointers”,

chapter 15 of The Rust Programming Language.

std::ops::Deref trait documentation

[@46:40] - Optimizing the size of your Rust

binaries by Sylvain Kerkour

cargo-bloat, for determining

the size impact of code and dependencies

twiggy, a similar tool for WASM targets

[@48:10] - RFC: Add more support for fallible allocations in

Vec by Daniel Paoliello

and contributors

Sean: This RFC is intended as a stop-gap, to unblock on-going work like—I

imagine—adding Rust to the Linux kernel while better long-term

solutions are explored.

“Example: Implementing Vec” chapter of the Rustnomicon, describes how

Vec’s memory allocation works in detail

Never type reference documentation

[@54:40] Tim: I want to bring out a comment that was made to me in private,

because I’ve been toying with the idea of becoming a rustc contributor,

particularly on the standard library side, and Ashley

Mannix sent me a really lovely note, which

was: “Rust is also chronically friendly so nobody gets chewed out for making mistakes. They happen. They get caught. They get patched. You learn something new. It’s ok.”.

[@55:51] - How we use Rust, SQLx and Rocket for Oso Cloud by Steve Olsen

Other items

[@57:20] Meetups

[@57:31] Major release announcements

DataFusion 8.0

IntelliJ Rust plugin 2022.1

[@57:40] Join us in the #this-week-in-rust channel of the Rustacean Station Discord server

Credits

Intro Theme: Aerocity

Audio Editing: Aleksandar Nikolic

Hosting Infrastructure: Jon Gjengset

Show Notes: Tim McNamara

Hosts: Tim McNamara, Sean Chen, and Allen Wyma.

...more

View all episodes

By Rustacean Station

4.9

6262 ratings