Search, explore and learn
Welcome to the latest edition of the Rust Trends newsletter, where I bring you the latest news and updates from the vibrant Rust community. Whether you are a seasoned Rust programmer or just getting started, there is something here for everyone. In this edition, we are excited to highlight a few key events and resources that are sure to be of interest. From a highly anticipated conference to a cutting-edge magazine with a range of topics, we have got you covered. So sit back, relax, and dive into the world of Rust with us!
Today’s topics:
- Rust Nation UK 2023, some interesting talks
- GitHub’s new code search
- Rust Magazine
Rust Nation UK 2023, some interesting talks
Although Rust Nation 2023 took place on February 16th and 17th, the conference’s talks have just been released on YouTube, offering a wealth of insights and inspiration for Rustaceans everywhere. Here are some of the highlights from the conference’s talented speakers:
Fast Flexible Iteration with Rust & Rhai
In his talk at Rust Nation, Jonathan Strong introduced Rhai, a scripting language made in Rust that provides a safe and easy way to add scripting to any application. Rhai is an embedded scripting language and evaluation engine for Rust that allows for fast and flexible iteration. Strong explored how Rust can be used as a script and how Rhai can help to make that process even more efficient.
To learn more about Rhai and its applications, check out the video of Jonathan’s talk on YouTube.
Spreading Rust to the Rest of the Company: Moving Past the Proof of Concept
In his talk at Rust Nation, Tim McNamara, New Zealand’s “Rust guy” and Senior Software Engineer at AWS, discussed strategies for expanding Rust adoption in the workplace beyond the initial proof of concept. McNamara shared tips and ideas for bringing developers, including those without Rust expertise, up to speed with projects, and explored how to build a sustainable team even after the initial enthusiasm has faded.
If you are interested in expanding Rust adoption in your workplace or want to learn more about how to build a sustainable team, check out the video of Tim’s talk on YouTube.
Navigating the Ecosystem’s Constant Flux
In his talk at Rust Nation, Jon Gjengset explored the challenges of building applications and services with stability and long-term project sustainability in mind in Rust’s constantly evolving ecosystem. Gjengset discussed the changes that can happen when working with Rust, including crate versioning, backward compatibility, unstable features, minimum supported Rust versions, and 1.0 releases. He offered strategies for living with these changes and making the stable life easier.
As a long-time contributor to the Rust toolchain and ecosystem, Gjengset brings deep knowledge and experience to this topic. He’s also been teaching Rust since 2018, including live-streaming intermediate-level Rust programming and creating videos on advanced topics like async and await, pinning, variance, atomics, and dynamic dispatch.
To learn more about navigating Rust’s constant flux and building sustainable applications and services, check out the video of Jon’s talk on YouTube.
GitHub’s Code search
GitHub’s new code search experience allows developers to ask questions of code and get answers through iteratively searching, browsing, navigating, and reading code. To achieve this, GitHub built its own search engine from scratch, called Blackbird, specifically designed for code search in Rust. Existing solutions for code search didn’t meet the unique needs of code search, such as searching for punctuation, not stemming, not stripping stop words, and searching with regular expressions, and didn’t work at GitHub’s scale of over 200 million repositories with constantly changing code. For more information look also at this talk on Youtube.
Rust Magazine
The second and latest edition of Rust Magazine, a publication dedicated to the Rust programming language community. The magazine features contributions from Rustaceans all over the world and is maintained by a diverse editorial team.
Among others, this edition explores topics like optimizing Rust binary search and designing an API for a user-friendly retry crate.
They have nice articles so I would bookmark them if I were you.
Rust Magazine issue 2
Snippets
- Announcing Rust 1.68.0 – 9 March 2023, don’t forget
rustup update - Popular Github repo RustPython – a Python 3 interpreter written in Rust
Enjoy your Sunday, and have a great week ahead.
Thanks for reading!
Bob Peters
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn