Typst is a new markup-based typsetting system that is designed to be as powerful as LaTeX while being much easier to learn and use.

With Mountpoint for Amazon S3, your applications can access objects stored in Amazon S3 through file operations like open and read. Mountpoint for Amazon S3 automatically translates these operations into S3 object API calls, giving your applications access to the elastic storage and throughput of Amazon S3 through a file interface.

Early alpha. Written in Rust by the AWS team.

KBall and Nick interview one of the leaders of the Tauri project about this next generation app bundling toolkit: the security, size, and performance features that make it special (and dare we say, better than Electron?), and what’s coming next.

I was a programmer for 12 years. I then switched to support and people management for 12 years. I now want to go back to programming for the rest of my career. I started working at Zed Industries on January the 17th, helping build the Zed editor and be a Rust programmer wannabe. End of June is going to be the judgment day. Will I remain part of Zed?

That’s right. I have a six month contract with the company my ex-GitHub colleague founded. They are trusting me to become productive in Rust within 6 months. With no prior experience in Rust, this feels like a Herculean feat. The interesting part is that I abandoned a high-paying job to do this. And by the end of the six month contract, Zed Industries and I may decide to part ways and still be friends.

And I am blogging about my experience so far. It’s a mix of personal learnings and small technical bits and pieces sprinkled here and there. But it’s mostly about my personal experience.

On first glance, making a first person game without an engine or a graphics API seems like an almost impossible task. In this post I’ll show you how to do that using an algorithm called ray casting.

My goal here is to show how something that looks complicated can be broken down into simple pieces, and if I’ve done my job right, it should feel like you’ve discovered how the game works.

Take any plaintext, encrypt it & generate a PDF with a QR code that’s easy to scan back in.

Uses the Age format.

Tim McNamara is known as New Zealand’s Rust guy. He is the author of Rust in Action, and also a Senior Software Engineer at AWS, where he helps other builders with all things Rust.

The main reason why Gerhard is intrigued by Rust is the incredible resource frugality. Fewer CPUs means less energy used, which is good for the planet, and good for the monthly bill. This becomes most noticeable at Amazon’s scale, when S3, Lambda, CloudFront and other services start adding Rust components.

Rust and Haskell don’t shy away from powerful features. As a result, both languages have steep learning curves when compared with other languages. Trying to learn Rust or Haskell can be frustrating, especially in the first couple of months.

But if you already know Rust, you have a head start with Haskell; and vice versa.

In this article, we want to show how knowledge of one of these languages can help you get up to speed with another.

As Amos Wenger says in the opener to this 37 minute read:

Some bugs are merely fun. Others are simply delicious! Today’s pick is the latter.

It’ll take a deep dive into UTF-8 and UTF-16 to get to the bottom of this delicious bug. 🥺

This week we invited our friend Mat Ryer to join us for some good conversation about some Git tooling that’s been on our radar. You may know Mat from Go Time and also Grafana’s Big Tent, which we help to produce. We speculate, we discuss, we laugh, and Mat even breaks into song a few times. It’s good fun.

We linked to Fathy a few months back when he forked Chrome to turn HTML into SVG, but this time he’s really outdone himself by making it render to the terminal. What resulted is the Carbonyl web browser.

I have (re)written my password generator in Rust with support for many different patterns. From completely random ASCII, to memorable diceware-like passphrases, and anything in between, plus extras such as private IP addresses or MACs.

I’ve also classified these patterns for easy accessing, and based on the pattern entropy I provide guesstimates about the effort for a brute force attack.

This thing scans all 65k ports in 3 seconds, is scriptable with Python, Lua & Shell, “learns” based on your usage, and automatically pipes ports into Nmap.

sqlite-loadable-rs is a new framework for writing fast, performant, and mostly-safe SQLite extensions in Rust. These extensions are nearly as fast those written in C, with the added benefit of Rust’s memory safety features, easy access to thousands of 3rd party crates and packages on crates.io, all while maintaining a splendid developer experience.

Nick Cameron works on Rust at Microsoft. He shared these desires for Rust in 2023.

The core team used to call for blog posts to help plan the next year. The core team has pretty much disappeared and certainly hasn’t called for blog posts, but I’m going to write one anyway because I have opinions and I want you to hear them. Sorry. I think you should write such a post too!

Simon Willison is using this year’s Advent of Code as an opportunity to learn Rust.

He’s using Copilot to help him with syntax/snippets via comment-driven prompting. He’s using ChatGPT as a study partner by asking it questions about how to do things in Rust. Is it working?

So far I think this is working really well.

I feel like I’m beginning to get a good mental model of how Rust works, and a lot of the basic syntax is beginning to embed itself into my muscle memory.

The real test is going to be if I can first make it to day 25 (with no prior Advent of Code experience I don’t know how much the increasing difficulty level will interfere with my learning) and then if I can actually write a useful Rust program after that without any assistance from these AI models.

And honestly, the other big benefit here is that this is simply a lot of fun. I’m finding interacting with AIs in this way—as an actual exercise, not just to try them out—is deeply satisfying and intellectually stimulating.

This might be an early glimpse into the future of AI-assisted learning…

Multithreaded, cross-platform, reliable & written in Rust.

Matt Welsh:

I hesitated writing this post, because I don’t want to start, or get into, a holy war over programming languages. (Just to get the flame bait out of the way, Visual Basic is the best language ever!) But I’ve had a number of people ask me about my experience with Rust and whether they should pick up Rust for their projects. So, I’d like to share some of the pros and cons that I see of using Rust in a startup setting, where moving fast and scaling teams is really important.

The learning curve and hiring difficulties seem to be the major culprits, in Matt’s experience.

Compared to other programming languages such as Python and Go, Rust’s standard library is very small, including only core data structures in the standard library with all other functionality farmed out to 3rd party ecosystem crates, and a common complaint from new Rust developers is that they don’t know where to start: which crates they ought to use and which crates they ought to trust. This list attempts to answer those questions.

I, for one, welcome our new Rust overlords.

Webpack creator Tobias Koppers announcing its (Vercel-funded) successor:

Turbopack is built on a new incremental architecture for the fastest possible development experience. On large applications, it shows updates 10x faster than Vite and 700x faster than Webpack. On even larger applications, the difference is greater—often 20x faster than Vite.

Turbopack is open source and still in alpha. Here’s what the future may hold:

To start, Turbopack will be used for the Next.js 13 development server. It will power lightning-fast HMR, and it will support React Server Components natively, as well as TypeScript, JSX, CSS, and more.

Turbopack will eventually also power Next.js production builds, both locally and in the cloud. We’ll be able to share Turbo’s cache across your entire team, using Vercel Remote Caching.

Webpack users can also expect an incremental migration path into the Rust-based future with Turbopack.

Rust is quite popular, but why? Emil Ernerfeldt, CTO of rerun.io, shares his thoughts in the subject.

I believe Rust is the most important development in system programming languages since C. What is novel is not any individual feature (“Rust is not a particularly original language”), but the fact that so many amazing features have come together in one mainstream language.

Rust is not a perfect language (scroll down for my complaints!), but it’s so much nicer than anything else I’ve used.

I’m not alone in loving Rust - Rust has been the most loved language in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey for seven years straight. So what are the features that make me love Rust so much?

Here’s the motivation behind this Rust-based TUI:

I do most of my git work in a terminal but I frequently found myself using git GUIs for some use-cases like: index, commit, diff, stash, blame and log.

Unfortunately popular git GUIs all fail on giant repositories or become unresponsive and unusable.

GitUI provides you with the user experience and comfort of a git GUI but right in your terminal while being portable, fast, free and open source.

Lőrik Levente shared a real world comparrison between Tauri and Electron using a real application he’s building called Authme. The comparrison focused on all the major things you’d care about — Bundle size, startup time, performance, app backend, rendering your app, security, auto update, and developer experience.

Also, see this tweet from swyx.

Tauri vs Electron results are consistently mindblowing

App: 97% smaller
Startup: 50% faster
RAM: 33% less
Security: priceless

So, is Electron is being replaced? Lőrik says yes, but…

When Rich Harris was last on JS Party, he wondered aloud:

“Should I learn Rust? Should we rewrite the Svelte compiler in Rust?” Maybe it’s a terrible idea, I don’t know, but I think it’s at least worth investigating.

Well, the effort we’re linking to here isn’t by Rich, but another member of the Svelte community. Their reasoning:

My main reason for doing this, is to compile Svelte without Node.js and possibly use Deno instead.

And the state of the project:

This is still a big work in progress. I’m mainly working on this for fun and learning. I came up with the name rustle by combining rust and svelte (ruslte => rustle). The project is open to naming suggestions!