🦀 Git’s Rusty Revolution
Today’s issue: Arti 2.5.0, a Novel Look at Error Handling in Rust, and Work in Progress Rust
Happy new month Rustaceans!
In this issue, we cover Git’s latest release, spotlight a project, and highlight 10 awesome links of the week.
Here’s issue 126.
MAIN NEWS
Git’s Rusty Revolution
This being the first issue of the month, we wish you a productive month ahead. Onto our main news: Git just took a big step toward a safer future, and it’s bringing some serious Rust energy with it’s latest release v2.55.
Back in March 2025 with Git 2.49, the project quietly slipped in the first Rust code bindings that let Rust talk to libgit. It was all talk, no walk though; none of it actually shipped in the binaries.
Fast-forward to November 2025 and Git 2.52 released the first real Rust production code: a variant subsystem implementation. Smart move they made it optional. Got Rust compiler? Great. No? Fall back to the C version. It was basically a test balloon to let distros start prepping their build pipelines.
This year kept the momentum going. Git 2.54 introduced the ObjectID type in Rust as part of the SHA-1 to SHA-256 interoperability push.
But the real plot twist hits with v2.55: the Rust compiler is now required for building from source, unless you explicitly tell the build system to nope out.
Don’t panic if you’re just a casual git pull user, this doesn’t touch you at all. It’s purely for the brave souls compiling Git themselves. Want to stick with the C ways? Easy peasy:
# Meson
meson configure -Drust=disabled
# Makefile
make NO_RUST=YesPleaseThis has been a multi-year, and community-driven grind. Shoutout to everyone who pushed the iron oxide agenda forward. It’s a classic boil the frog strategy done right: gradual, low-drama, and forward-thinking.
Rust brings memory safety, fewer footguns, and that sweet modern vibe to one of the most battle-tested tools in our stack. Sure, it might ruffle some feathers, but for the long-term health of Git? This is huge.
We’re slowly replacing C with something that won’t randomly segfault when you least expect it.
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT 💡
Tungstenite
Tungstenite is the lightweight stream-based WebSocket implementation for Rust.
It gives you a clean stream-based API for both sync and async code, making it easy to drop into custom event loops or MIO-based setups.
What makes it stand out:
Bare-bones done right: Tiny footprint focused purely on the protocol. No bloat, no forced runtime opinions, and perfect when you need control.
TLS that doesn’t suck: Native support for native-tls or rustls (pick your poison) so HTTPS endpoints don’t become a special nightmare.
Autobahn-certified: It actually passes the full WebSocket test suite.
Tungstenite is open-source at https://github.com/snapview/tungstenite-rs.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK 🔗
Rust 1.96.1 is out with fixes for Cargo HTTP retries/timeouts, a MIR miscompilation, and three libssh2 CVEs. Rust Innovation Lab welcomes Wild, a fast Rust-written linker for Linux (with more OSes planned), to speed up build times and iteration. Also Rustup 1.30 plans is out: Refining implicit toolchain installs, removing curl backend, adding XDG support, and restricting toolchain names.
Encore embedded a full in-memory Redis server (ported to Rust) directly into its runtime for seamless, production-identical local development and testing.
Wgpu v30.0.0 is out with major updates including optional vertex buffers, explicit integer I/O interpolation, empty buffer slices, HDR surface color spaces, and many API/behavior changes for WebGPU compliance.
The talented Rustaceans at Mainmatter published C to Rust Migration Book that teaches safe FFI, incremental migration techniques, and idiomatic Rust practices through theory and hands-on exercises.
Dmitrii’s thoughtful take on why A big stdlib is overkill for supply chain security. He suggests maintaining key crates under rust-lang org (like Go x/) and use auditing instead.
Arti 2.5.0 released: The Rust Tor implementation stabilizes Counter Galois Onion and Congestion Control for better performance, includes DoS fixes, and raises MSRV to 1.91.
Jared’s A Novel Look at Error Handling in Rust, teaches continue-but-report error handling: pass MultiErrors collector to functions for defaults + error tracking, complementing standard Result.
Kang open-sourced libbeef, a Rust port of Fabrice Bellard’s tiny arbitrary-precision floating-point library libbf.
Parsa found a real Rust compiler miscompilation bug where bool as u32 was optimized away, breaking a parser. Reported it; fixed in 18 hours.
Louis wrote Work In Progress Rust introducing techniques and a wip crate to defer error handling with warnings, letting developers stay in the happy path longer.
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Been watching the World Cup with friends, and one of the best parts is seeing people from every corner of the world passionately cheering for their countries.
See you next week!
John & Elley.