A Look at Rust's 2024 Social Status Update
Today’s Issue: The Container Runtime on a Roll, Compiler-Driven Development in Rust, and How We Made the Deno Language Server Ten Times Faster
Hello Rustacean!
Welcome to another edition of the Rust Bytes newsletter. In this issue, we’ll highlight Rust’s social status report, present a Rust challenge, spotlight an amazing Rust project, and highlight some incredible links of the week.
Welcome to issue 36.
THE MAIN THING
A Look at Rust's 2024 Social Status Update
The Rust social status update report is out and it’s a bit like a rogue tomato plant in your garden - unexpected, a little wild, but undeniably interesting. It turns out tracking Rust's popularity is harder than, well, keeping up with your rogue tomato plant.
Here's the gist:
Rust User Groups. Growing steadily, with some exploding like popcorn (think 20% annual growth!). The biggest ones are in London and NYC, but there's even a brand new one in Israel (hey there!).
Social Media. Rust is all the rage on Twitter, with official accounts and passionate communities springing up. Even Facebook is getting in on the action, with groups showing healthy growth.
Reddit. Rust subreddits are seeing a nice bump in subscribers, with r/rust growing at a rate of 25% annually (get those metaphorical seeds in the ground!).
Other Platforms. There's a mysterious world of Rust groups on Telegram and maybe even WhatsApp (investigate further at your own risk).
The Big But. While everyone seems to love Rust (Stack Overflow says it's the most admired language!), the number of actual job openings isn't quite there yet. So, Rust might be the coolest kid in school, but the career opportunities are still developing.
The Good News. Rust is climbing the popularity charts on various programming language ranking sites. It's even nudged C out of a top spot (sorry C, time to up your game!).
The Overall Takeaway. Rust is on a roll! It's a language that people are excited about and actively learning. While the job market might not be booming just yet, keep an eye on this space - Rust could be the next big thing.
Thanks to Gabor Szabo (szabgab) for putting the Rust social status update 2024.06 report together. Read the Full Report.
RUST CHALLENGE❓
In our previous issue we shared a Rust tip with you on working with environemnt variables directly inside Cargo.toml manifest file. If you missed it you can check it out here.
Here is a challenge for you.
DESCRIPTION:
Given 2 strings, a
and b
, return a string of the form short+long+short, with the shorter string on the outside and the longer string on the inside. The strings will not be the same length, but they may be empty ( zero
length ).
For example: (Input1, Input2) --> output
("1", "22") --> "1221"
("22", "1") --> "1221"
short_long_short("1", "22"); // returns "1221"
short_long_short("22", "1"); // returns "1221"
You can share your solution with us and a snippet of the code on Rust Playground. Enjoy.
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT 💡
youki: The Container Runtime on a Roll (or Should We Say in a Pod?)
Youki is a container runtime implementation of the OCI runtime-spec , similar to runc.
Youki isn't your average container runtime. It's written in Rust, making it memory-efficient and potentially faster than its competitors. But youki's real claim to fame is its name - pronounced "yoh-key" which means "container" in Japanese.
Not only is youki functional, it's also fun! They even admit it's "hilarious" in their documentation.
Here are some of the features that make Youki fun:
Faster than runc (allegedly) - They even have the benchmarks to prove it (kind of).
Runs Docker and Podman - Because who wants to be picky about container orchestration tools?
Rootless mode - Security-conscious developers, rejoice!
Easy to set up - Youki even includes a "just build" command for the impatient.
Youki is still under development, but it's actively maintained and integrates with all the cool tools.
So, if you're looking for a container runtime with a personality, Youki might just be your container soulmate.
P.S. Check out their documentation for some serious laughs and actual technical information too.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK 🔗
Dioxus Labs' latest article, Dioxus Labs + “High-level Rust” is a spicy take on the current state or Rust.
Niko Matsakis (Michelangelo of Memory Safety) wrote about Claiming - a new trait promising to simplify ownership and make your coding experience a joyride (well, a slightly less frustrating one).
Pranav released rschess - A Rust chess library with the aim to be as feature-rich as possible.
Jakob’s part 3 article on Why WebAssembly came to the Backend is out.
Tired of writing code the old-fashioned way? Tristram Oaten's latest video on Compiler-Driven Development in Rust might be your missing piece.
Olivier Faure from Linebender wrote a Report on the RustNL 2024 Unconference.
The Simplified Embedded Rust Book by Omar Hiari is now Available in Paperback.
The Deno team blogged about How We Made the Deno Language Server Ten Times Faster.
Nuii released vterm - A fast, cross platform, vulkan based terminal emulator.
Thinking of building chat apps or distributed systems in Rust? TheTraitModern's guide to inter-process communication shows you how to make processes talk to each other.
Do you have a challenging Rust problem or a helpful tip you'd like to share with fellow Rustaceans? We'd be more than happy to feature them in a future issue, with full credit given to you. Submit your challenges or tips to us via email rustaceanseditors@gmail.com.
BEFORE YOU GO 👋
You're our biggest fans, and we love to see it.
Here are a few ways you can help us spread the word:
❤️ Recommend Rust Bytes to your friends.
🤳 Connect with us on our socials: X, Rustaceans Publication.
📨 Contact us through rustaceanseditors@gmail.com feedback is welcome.
☕️ Buy Us Coffee.
That's all for now, Rustaceans. Don't forget to get away from the keyboard a-bit.
John & Elley.