Rust Bytes: “Rust Won’t Save Us”

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Rustaceans

3 min readFeb 11, 2024

Hello Rustacean! Welcome to another edition of the Rust Bytes newsletter. In this issue, we’ve got exciting updates from the Rust Foundation, a project spotlight, amazing links of the week, and Rust job opportunities

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Welcome to #Issue 9!

Rust Pun

Why did the Rust developer bring a shovel to the codebase?
To bury those unsafe pointers deep!

Main Thing

In a recent blog post, the Rust Foundation disclosed that Google has generously contributed $1 million to bolster the C++/Rust Interop Initiative. This initiative aims to enhance interoperability between Rust and C++.

Recognizing Rust’s potential for a safer, more secure, and sustainable technical landscape, the Rust Foundation acknowledges the challenges involved in transitioning existing C++ codebases to Rust. The Interop Initiative, supported by Google, seeks to facilitate a smoother transition to Rust for organizations deeply entrenched in C++.

The initiative’s primary objective is to ensure seamless interoperability between existing C++ code and Rust, accommodating various scenarios such as integrating new Rust code, adding functionality to products, or gradually migrating from C++ to Rust. The Rust Foundation plans to draft a scope of work proposal for discussion among its members, the Rust Project Leadership Council, stakeholders, and relevant member organizations.

For more detailed insights, read the announcement here. The announcement was also on Google blog.

Project Spotlight

Rust Analyzer is a Rust compiler front-end designed for IDEs. Its toolchain encompasses integrations like VSCode themes and various tools and bindings for your preferred editors.

Rust analyser offers valuable assistance by providing useful information as you code, along with highlighting potential issues for your attention.

The project is maintained by the Rust analyser team of the Rust -Lang and is open for contributions. You can check out the project on GitHub.

Awesome links of the week

“Why we have rewritten the string data type”: This blog post details a substantial refactor in the Polars project, focusing on the overhaul of its string/binary data structure.
“Rye: A Vision Continued”: The article delves into the creation and evolution of Rye, a Python packaging and project management tool designed to offer a seamless user experience, with its development undertaken in Rust.
Rust Won’t Save Us: An Analysis of 2023’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities by Zach Hanley examines the prevalence and root causes of exploited vulnerabilities, highlighting memory safety issues and web routing abuses among the key concerns. It discusses the significance of vulnerabilities in appliances and offers recommendations for vendors, developers, defenders, and researchers to mitigate risks. The analysis underscores the ongoing need for vigilance in software development and emphasizes community collaboration in addressing security challenges.
Rust web frameworks have subpar error reporting Author: Luca Palmiei. This article delves into the issue of error reporting in major Rust web frameworks, asserting that none of them meet the author’s definition of excellent error reporting. Drawing from years of experience building production APIs in Rust and teaching backend development, the author introduces Pavex, their own web framework, which aims to address these shortcomings. The post outlines the journey and rationale behind Pavex’s error reporting design, comparing it with existing frameworks like axum and Actix Web.
“Rust has exposed my lack of knowledge on how computers work”. Reddit post. This article reflects on the author’s journey of learning Rust and how it has exposed gaps in their understanding of low-level computer concepts. Despite being an experienced web developer, delving into Rust, a systems language, has led them to confront unfamiliar territory such as memory management, thread safety, compiler bootstrapping, and other low-level intricacies.

Rust Bytes: “Rust Won’t Save Us”

Rust Pun

Main Thing

Project Spotlight

Awesome links of the week

Rust Jobs

Before You Go

Written by Rustaceans Editors