Changelog

The latest Rust user survey results are in and have been shared on the rust blog. One of the more interesting points, before digging into the data, is the survey launched for the first time in multiple languages — 14 languages total, in addition to English. The results from non-English languages totaled 25% of all responses and helped push the number of responses to a new record of 5,991 responses. I’m glad we’re getting to hear from more voices from all around the world — especially growing the response count by 25%! Also, pay attention to the comments shared about how Rust can improve. Good stuff.

Michael Snoyman introduces his upcoming blog series. If this intro is any indicator, Michael’s Rust crash course will be an excellent resource. Here’s a taste, in which he begins to answer the question, “Why Rust?”: I’m a strong believer in using the compiler to help eliminate bugs. No programming language can eliminate all bugs and even the best designed language will typically need to leave developers plenty of wiggle room to shoot themselves in the foot. Still, there’s significant value in safety and long term maintainability of projects that use languages with this focus.

Right now, the only way to sign your git commits is to use PGP signatures (this is all git is able to integrate with). After a less than desirable experience using GPG, without wrote bpb in Rust to replace GPG. I’ve been taking steps toward trying to sign and verify the data in the repo’s index without shipping a copy of GPG with Rust to every user. This means I need to implement enough of the PGP protocol to create signatures and public keys that git will accept as valid. I’ve done this in a library which I’ve named pbp, this stands for Pretty Bad Protocol. This library implements parsing and generation for a small subset of the PGP protocol…

GCSF is a virtual filesystem that allows users to mount their Google Drive account locally and interact with it as a regular disk partition. Could this be the first sane way to interact with your GDrive? 😜

Careful now, ‘sled’ is in its alpha stage. Heck, its name is a recursive acronym that means “sled likes eating data”, so that should give you an indication of its state (I hope they come up with a new one once the software is stable). The project’s goals are on point: don’t make the user think. the interface should be obvious. don’t surprise users with performance traps. don’t wake up operators. bring reliability techniques from academia into real-world practice. don’t use so much electricity. our data structures should play to modern hardware’s strengths.

This is the story of how Rust dramatically improving Figma’s server-side performance (one of their most important features). The multiplayer server we launched with two years ago is written in TypeScript and has served us surprisingly well, but Figma is rapidly growing more popular and that server isn’t going to be able to keep up. We decided to fix this by rewriting it in Rust.

Install this and leave your co-workers asking, “where does s/he get those wonderful toys?”

A desktop Kanban board app built with Elm and Rust. How do they do it sans Electron? it uses native WebView (WebKit for Linux/macOS, and MSHTML on Windows) For more details see here. I’d love to see how this app performs in terms of memory use when compared to an Electron-based version. How big are the wins? Is the trade-off worth it? Sounds like great fodder for blog post…

Lin Clark joined the show to talk about Code Cartoons, her work at Mozilla in the emerging technologies group, Rust, Servo, and WebAssembly (aka Wasm), the Rust community’s big goal in 2018 for Rust to become a web language (thanks in part to Wasm), passing objects between Rust and JavaScript, Rust libraries depending on JavaScript packages and vice versa, Wasm ES Modules, and Lin’s upcoming keynote at Fluent on the parallel future of the browser.

Want to try WASM before you buy WASM? You’re in luck! I found this while prepping for this week episode of The Changelog with Lin Clark. It’s really well made and definitely lowered the barrier for me to tinker with both WebAssembly and Rust. Worth a 🔖 for sure.

wasm-pack is a tool for assembling and packaging Rust crates that target WebAssembly. These packages can be published to the npm Registry and used alongside other packages. This means you can use them side-by-side with JS and other packages, and in many kind of applications, be it a Node.js server side app, a client-side application bundled by Webpack, or any other sort of application that uses npm dependencies. We’re recording a show with Lin Clark today and will definitely ask her all about the progress Mozilla folks have been making on merging the JavaScript and Rust worlds via WebAssembly. Exciting times!

It’s a reimagining of the Singularity OS of old, using new technologies like WebAssembly and Rust. Using an intermediate language as a compile target for applications allows for architecture agnosticism and interesting optimizations that would not be possible on conventional OSes. Here’s to the crazy ones. 🍻

Spotifyd streams music just like the official client, but is more lightweight, and supports more platforms. Spotifyd also supports the Spotify Connect protocol, which makes it show up as a device that can be controlled from the official clients. There was previously a spotifyd written in C, but apparently Spotify killed the library it used, so they had to rewrite from scratch. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Inspired by Vim’s modal editing, but built to be as simple as possible. This is no fly-by-night proof of concept. It’s 3 years in the making and looks extremely polished. I’m definitely going to give Amp a test-drive. 👌

We talked with Jeremy Soller, the BDFL of Redox OS, a Unix-like Operating System written in Rust, aiming to bring the innovations of Rust to a modern microkernel and full set of applications. In this episode we talk about; OS design principals, Jeremy’s goals for Redox, why is Rust, the Micro-kernel, the Filesystem, how Linux isn’t secure enough, how he’s funding this his development, and a coding style in Rust called Safe Rust.

Whether its compiling some fake code, downloading some fake files, or inspecting some fake hexidecimals, if you need to feign real work to impress your [boss|colleagues|s.o.], genact has you covered.

This framework is very much in the proof of concept stage. There’s still a lot to do. The framework provides a seamless GraphQL interface for Rust servers. It is type-safe, ergonomic, very low boilerplate, and customizable. It has potential to be very fast. I believe that it can be one of the best experiences for GraphQL development in any language, as well as one of the fastest implementations (in part, because it seems to me that Rust and GraphQL are a great fit). Also, check out ~> 2018: The year we learn Rust 1.0 and Rust in 2018

We’re a week late on this one, but excited to see Sean and the Diesel team hit the big One O! For those who don’t know, Diesel is: a safe, extensible query builder and ORM If you want to learn more about Diesel straight from the horse’s mouth, go back and listen to Episode #270.

Inspired by Elm and React.

Zero-details, privacy-focused embeddable file system. It achieves privacy by encapsulating files and directories into an encrypted repo, then provides a virtual file system and exclusive access to authorized apps. But! Buyer beware: Zbox is under active development, we are not responsible for any data loss or leak caused by using it. Always back up your files and use at your own risk!

a SSH Agent that allow users to authenticate to UNIX/Linux SSH servers using the Secure Enclave My Touch Bar Macbook Pro may have just found its killer app.

Sean Griffin joins the show to talk about doing Rails full-time, his love of Rust. and his project Diesel - a safe, extensible ORM and query builder for Rust. We discuss Sean’s path to working full-time on Rails, what he works on specifically, why Rust, why Diesel, and how much of Diesel’s design and featureset is a product of his experience with ActiveRecord and Rails.

Jack Moffitt joined the show to talk about Servo, an experimental web browser layout engine. We talked about what the Servo project aims to achieve, six areas of performance, and what makes Rust a good fit for this effort.

Steve Klabnik and Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about the Rust Programming Language, a systems programming language from Mozilla Research. We covered memory safety without garbage collection, security, the Rust 1.0 Beta, getting started with Rust, and we even hypothesize about the future of the Rust.