🦀 Keys Not IPs
Today’s issue: Stepping Down From Active Development, OpenAI as a Platinum Member, and Bevy v0.19 Is Here
Hello Rustaceans!
In this issue, we cover the recent Iroh 1.0 stable release, spotlight a project, and highlight 10 awesome links of the week.
Here’s issue 124.
MAIN NEWS
Keys Not IPs
While Elon was becoming the world’s first trillionaire and his SpaceX IPO was flooding the socials with rocket emojis and humblebrags, the nerds at n0 shipped iroh 1.0. And honestly? Their core pitch is deliciously simple: dial keys, not IPs.
Your device’s IP can hide behind a firewall but a key? That’s yours. It follows you across networks, survives moves, and lets you build secure, direct connections that just work. No more praying to the NAT gods.
In the last 30 days alone, their public relays saw over 200 million endpoints. Devs are already using it for video streaming, LLM training, secure chats, games, file transfers, you name it.
The upgrades since the earlier versions are impressive: QUIC multipath for hot-swapping routes, NAT traversal that keeps things encrypted, local-first discovery (works offline!), WASM/browser support, and even custom transports like BLE or (soon) LoRa.
It’s turning the messy internet into secure localhost. Plus, 95% of data often goes direct peer-to-peer, which means happier wallets and a slightly less congested internet.
They also delivered on the language front with official Python, Node.js, Kotlin, and Swift bindings now that the API is stable. Wire protocol stability means your v1 endpoints can talk across languages and minor versions without drama. It’s a big “we’re done churning the API, come build” energy.
If you’re tired of networking feeling like herding cats over UDP, iroh 1.0 is worth looking into. The “dial by key” abstraction is the kind of elegant shift that makes you wonder why we put up with the old mess for so long.
Less net work for networks, Rustaceans.
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT 💡
Parking_lot
Parking_lot provides implementations of Mutex, RwLock, Condvar and Once that are smaller, faster and more flexible than those in the Rust standard library.
Std locks bloat memory (sometimes hiding a whole Box behind the scenes), crawl under contention, suffer reader/writer starvation, and break on older Windows. parking_lot solves that by keeping everything lean and mean while still playing nice across platforms.
What makes it genuinely awesome:
Ridiculously compact: Mutex needs just 1 byte, RwLock/Condvar a single word.
Lightning uncontended paths: Single atomic ops for the common case, plus smart spinning for microcontention before it gracefully yields.
Extra superpowers: Raw locking without RAII guards, eventual fairness, and even an optional deadlock detector if you’re feeling paranoid.
And it’s open-source at https://github.com/amanieu/parking_lot.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK 🔗
OpenAI joined the Rust Foundation as a Platinum Member with a $600,000 contribution to support maintainers, key projects, and ecosystem growth.
Deno merged a major port of console/inspect from JS to Rust, slashing 01_console.js by 83%, shrinking the snapshot, and keeping output identical.
Jakub Beránek wrote how in Rust, any memory safety bug triggerable from safe code is a library soundness CVE. In C/C++, it’s usually “your fault” for misusing the API. CVE counts mislead.
NVIDIA Research open-sourced cutile-rs, a powerful system for writing memory-safe, data-race-free GPU kernels in idiomatic Rust, enforcing ownership across the host-GPU boundary with tile-based partitioning and CUDA Tile IR.
The Rustaceans at turbopuffer released alyze, a high-performance Rust library for UAX tokenization and full-text analysis (lowercasing, stemming, stopwords) using DFA.
After a 154-day silence since their last release, Bevy has released v0.19. It brings next-gen BSN scenes, massive rendering performance gains, contact shadows, richer UI/text, and many editor-focused improvements.
Epic Games released Lore, an open-source VCS written in Rust that tackles code and hefty binary assets alike. Think version control, but with fewer panic attacks when the asset folder shows up.
Greg (Leptos creator) is stepping down from active development. The framework is feature-complete and not abandoned just lightly maintained and open for new maintainers. Classic OSS retirement vibes.
Rust image-png crate is now even faster, as the world’s fastest PNG decoder, and is now the default in Chromium and GNOME.
Firefox 151 now uses zlib-rs for gzip (de)compression, with huge speedups and memory safety after fixing Intel CPU bugs.
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Bumped into this cool game last week. I swear you might like it: https://messenger.abeto.co.
See you next week!
John & Elley.