Stay current. Skip the noise.

I have blogged a few times before about Stacked Borrows, my proposed aliasing model for Rust. But I am a researcher, and what researchers (are expected to) do is write papers—so that’s what...

As I’ve said before, I’m working on a book about lifetimes. Or maybe it’s just a long series - I haven’t decided the specifics yet. Like every one of my series/book things, it’s long, and it starts...

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

I’ve accidentally left our garage door open a few times. To combat this I built a monitor that sends an alert via Mattermost when the door has been left open for more than 5 minutes. This turned out to be a super fun project. I used parts on hand as much as possible, implemented the monitoring application in Rust, and then built a stripped down Linux image to run it.

Berlin based technology consultancy specialising in the Rust programming language. We offer development, implementation, training and long-term support.

Joshua Liebow-Feeser took to the stage at RustConf to describe the methodology that his team u [...]

Rust recursive tree sum in assembly: the tail call becomes a loop, and the enum discriminator is optimized away because the right Box pointer serves as one.

A walkthrough creating a new date-time algorithm from the ground up, optimizing it along the way.

If you use async Rust and Tokio, you are likely to run into some variant of the "future is not Send" compiler error. While transitioning some sequential asyn...

We're rewriting parts of Microsoft's SymCrypt cryptographic library in Rust to improve memory safety and defend against side-channel attacks, enabling formal verification while maintaining backward compatibility via a Rust-to-C compiler:

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

A while ago, I built a system-tray application in Rust to notify me of new e-mail called buzz. It was working fine, but every now and again, it would fail to connect to the mail server on boot if it started before my network connection was up. Sounds easy enough to fix, so I just added a loop around my connect (even made it have exponential backoff!) and considered the issue dealt with.

Looking back at my year of Rust. Part reflection, part waymark.

As a Rust newbie, I was confused by the different ways used to represent strings. The “References and Borrowing” chapter of the Rust bookuses three differen...

tokio select cancellation safety, tested on four loops: a cancelled read_exact ended the stream, read_line damaged 500 lines, send() lost 6,776 of 10,000 items.

Rust dynamic dispatch: use Box or, since 1.79, &mut dyn Read directly in if branches, avoiding manual stack slots.

I don’t mean to complain. Doing software engineering for a living is a situation of extreme privilege. But there’s something to be said about how alienating it can be at times. Once, just once, I w...

Rust iterators are lazy; chaining map and for_each can create and join threads one by one, killing parallelism and making code 10x slower.

Rust's stabilization is stressful; the post proposes four phases—accepted RFC, preview, semver stable, recommended—to ship features incrementally.

Note: this blog post was not written by me. It was posted as a comment on r/rust by user matthieum, and was so well received that I thought it deserved to reach a broader audience. He gave me permission to repost it here. Everything below this paragraph has been taken verbatim from there. — Disclaimer: I love logging. I’ve implemented no less than 4 complete logging systems at various companies in the last 16 years, two of which were low-latency.

We studied how Rust learners misunderstand ownership, then built grounded visualizations and an experimental Rust book that improve learning.

More tricks up in the ArcSwap’s sleeve

Highlights from my AMA about the Way of Rhea launch.

Async Rust with io_uring isn't cancellation-safe: canceled futures may leak TCP connections, affecting all runtimes. Fixes need I/O and halt safety.

An incremental C++-to-Rust rewrite succeeded and simplified code, but heavy FFI brought unsafe UB, Miri gaps, leaks, tooling and ABI pain.

Rust’s SIMD abstractions were not as safe as I’d like. Until now.

AI code rewrites reveal trade-offs: don't trust single benchmarks or language hype; you still must read code, think critically, handle failure modes.

An engineer ported Rust's std and libc to Minix, fixing bindings and using GNU pth for threads; ripgrep now compiles and runs.

What Are Bitfields? The C programming language is a product of a time where it was important to use as few resoures as possible. Memory was measured in kilobytes rather than gigabytes as we do today. Bitfields offer a handy way to reduce memory usage. However, bitfields aren’t just a relic of yesteryear’s computer programming; they remain frequently used today. Some domains, like embedded hardware, still require programmers to be frugal with memory. Projects like Nginx as well as many Linux kernel modules also reduce memory usage this way. Moreover, some hardware interfaces expect bits to be laid out in a particular format.

I've recently read an article criticizing Rust, and, while it made a bunch of good points, I didn't enjoy it --- it was an easy to argue with piece. In general, I feel that I can't recommend an article criticizing Rust. This is a shame --- confronting drawbacks is important, and debunking low effort/miss informed attempts at critique sadly inoculates against actually good arguments.

First steps towards having BPF support in rustc

I’ve heard a lot about classic Doom’s data format and decided to write some Rust code to extract its maps and convert that to vector graphics I could laser cut.

GCC's Rust front-end reuses rustc components like rustc_parse_format and polonius, with a bootstrapping plan to compile them itself.