Across the Chasm with Rust

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: July 18th, 2022

Across the Chasm with Rust

We've been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it's not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for July 18th, 2022.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guests were Steve Klabnik and Luqman Aden. Other speakers included Dan Cross, Tim McNamara, and others. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• @0:27 let_chains are stable in Rust 1.64
  • Adam's tweet
  • The stabilization PR, with the full saga leading up to stabilization
  • As Steve mentions, the feature dates all the way back to 2017 and extends the Swift-inspired if let expressions Rust has had for a while
  • Some Rust features, like async functions in traits, are huge rabbit holes
  • Discussion about Rust's commitment to stability and how it's enforced with things like crater
  • As an example of the process leading to burnout in programming language communities: Guido stepping down as BDFL after PEP 572 (Assignment Expressions, "the walrus operator")
  • Discussion about Ruby also taking stability seriously: flip-flops weren't removed in Ruby 2.0 in part because of this pretty incredible snippet from Yusuke Endoh
  • Quines and variations, Yusuke Endoh's Qlobe (reproduced here), their infamous quine-relay, and their other projects
  • The G-Portugol programming language
  • The unstable features mechanism in Rust ("first class support for experimental features") and how this allows for user experimentation
  • Exclusive range patterns in Rust and some of their perils, specifically in tock
  • Contrasting the Rust unstable feature mechanism with Haskell language pragmas: the former requires a nightly compiler to use, the latter does not
• @18:20 Discussion about the Rust process; going from RFC to stable Rust
  • The Rust inline assembly feature (tracking issue)
  • The Rust RFC repo
  • The Generic Associated Types (GATs) Rust RFC
  • hubris is on nightly Rust but with an allow list of features
  • Naked functions in Rust (tracking issue), Destructuring assignments, #[cmse_nonsecure_entry]
  • Talking about LWN-style reports and curation as a way to lessen the pain of using Zulip style chat platforms for discussion
  • LWN is hiring, looking for someone to keep up with Rust development, among other things
• [[partial notes]]