Rust Week You Didn’t Wanna Miss
Today’s Issue: $20,000 Performance Bounty, Evolution of Rust Compiler Error, and Is Rust the Future of Programming?
Hello Rustaceans!
Welcome to another edition of the Rust Bytes newsletter.
In this issue, we’ll recap how Rust Week went down at Utretch, challenge you with a puzzle, spotlight an amazing Rust project, and share some incredible links of the week.
Here’s issue 67 for you!
THE MAIN THING
Rust Week You Didn’t Wanna Miss
Rust Week went down at Utrecht last week, and it was a blast seeing people from various companies building killer products and Rust enthusiasts meet up to geek out about Rust all week long.
Apparently, this wasn't your typical yawn-inducing tech conference. We're talking actual activities. Bowling? Bike tours? cinema? hackathon? boardgames? Crafting rusty steel logos? It sounds more like a coding summer camp for the truly hardcore. And get this, even a "Sewer meetup" for the Ratatui crew.
The Rust Team, RustRover, Zed team, Servo, Oniro, Leptos, Bevy, Main Matter, and Slint teams were present. It's pretty cool to see such a vibrant and engaged community around a language that's often (unfairly) perceived as having a steep learning curve.
Alex Crichton kicked things off with his talk on “10 years of Rust”, talking on how Rust has evolved since he joined the team and what keeps him hooked on the project. On Thursday, the Rust Team dropped v1.87.0, perfectly timed with the decade anniversary of Rust.
Here are some of the talks and highlights of the conference:
Monday and Tuesday - (Conference Days): Talks on Rust applications, including Rust for Linux, speedy cryptography (Graviola), DNA processing, atomic ordering, fearless refactoring, Rust/C++ interop, and Bevy’s immutable components.
Wednesday and Thursday - 10 Years of Rust Celebration: A massive event commemorating a decade of the Rust programming language, featuring retrospectives, community highlights, and big announcements. Short talks by team members, alumni, friends, and sponsors were also given. Also, the live release of Rust 1.87.0 dropped this day.
The week wrapped up with a hackathon and a participant-led “unconference” for those who prefer their talks like their types: inferred and loosely scoped. Whether you were slinging code, soaking in the vibes, or just there for the stroopwafels and compiler jokes, Rust Week had something for you.
So, go watch those talks here, and maybe rent a bike to channel some Utrecht vibes. Because if Rust Week taught us anything, it’s that safe code and good times don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
RUST CHALLENGE 🦀
Last week, we challenged you with a puzzle to show the usage of .drain function.
Thanks to Nothing, ANGSUDO, Freddy's Space, Hicham Belouadah, EggSwap, and Serpent7776 who shared their solutions to the challenge. You rock! 🤘
Let's move on to this week’s challenge.
Generate All String Permutations
Write a function generate_permutations that generates all possible permutations of a given string. A permutation is a rearrangement of the characters in the string, where each character is used exactly once.
You can start writing and testing your solution on Rust Playground. Once completed, please share your solution and tag us either on X, BlueSky, Mastodon, or reply to this email.
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT 💡
BugStalker
BugStalker is a modern, Rust-native debugger designed specifically for Linux x86-64 environments.
Debugging Rust programs can be complex due to the language’s unique features like ownership, smart pointers, and async runtimes. BugStalker combines simplicity, power, and deep integration with Rust’s ecosystem.
Most debuggers often lack tailored support for Rust’s type system and concurrency models, leading to cumbersome workflows and limited visibility into program state. BugStalker addresses these pain points.
Here is what makes BugStalker shine as a debugging tool:
Rust-Native Design - Built in Rust for Rust, ensuring deep compatibility with collections, smart pointers, and thread locals.
Comprehensive Debugging Tools - Supports breakpoints, step-by-step execution, watchpoints, and signal handling.
Advanced Runtime Inspection - Query and interact with data using expressions, with full multithreaded and async support.
Extensible Architecture - Features an oracle extension mechanism, including a built-in Tokio oracle for runtime inspection without code changes.
BugStalker’s combination of simplicity, power, and extensibility makes it an essential tool for Rust developers seeking to debug with confidence and efficiency.
And the cherry on top is that it is open-source on GitHub at https://github.com/godzie44/BugStalker.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK 🔗
Rust v1.87.0 got released on its 10th anniversary. Released live from Utrecht at Rust Week, new features include anonymous pipes, safe arch intrinsics, asm! jumps, and precise capturing in traits. Update via `rustup update stable`.
The Rust nerds at HelixDB have open-sourced helix-db, a powerful, open-source, graph-vector database built in Rust for intelligent data storage for RAG and AI.
Jakub Beránek got inspired by RustWeek talks, and discussed the evolution of Rust compiler error messages by analyzing outputs from all stable Rust releases since version 1.0.0, highlighting improvements like numerical error codes, colorful messages, and the continuous effort by contributors to enhance error clarity.
Ilia Afanasiev from Rust Rover attempted to answer the question we’ve all been asking Is Rust the Future of Programming?
Xd009642’s wrote about Tarpaulins Week Of Speed, discussing a Rust code coverage tool, achieving a stunning 98% speedup in LLVM coverage reporting, transforming a tedious 41-minute process into a brisk 2.5-minute.
Charlie Marsh (Founder & CEO of Astral) interviewed in Rust In Production and talked about how they are revolutionizing Python tooling with Rust-powered gems like Ruff and uv, making tasks like linting and package management lightning-fast, think 10x to 100x faster than pip. [video]
Materialize engineers identified and fixed a rare concurrency bug in Rust's unbounded channels, specifically in the crossbeam library and Rust's standard library, which caused double-free memory errors.
Julian Goldstein wrote about "How to Build a Rollercoaster While It’s on Fire", discussing the creation of a lock-free, fixed-size array (LockFreeArray) in Rust, using atomics and a freelist to enable thread-safe insertions and removals without locks, with 83.19% faster on average over mutex-based alternatives.
Prossimo’s waving a juicy $20,000 for any code wizard to turbo-charge their Rust-based rav1d AV1 decoder and make it as fast as its C-based cousin. If you’re a performance geek dreaming of some sweet vacation cash, this is your chance.
Ohad Ravid authored "A Rust API Inspired by Python, Powered by Serde", detailing a method to adapt Python’s dynamic __getattr__ functionality into a Rust API with the serde crate, creating a streamlined, Python-inspired interface for querying system information such as fan speeds.
Bonus
In Celes' Ramblings “The Language That Never Was”, he describes the vision for an ideal game development language, "Rebel," intended to enhance Rust with features like value types and hot reloading, but abandoned the project due to burnout, frustration with the Rust community, and the realization that C# sufficed, ultimately using it to complete their game, Carrot Survivors.
CodeCrafters: Become a Better Rust Engineer
CodeCrafters created amazing Rust courses that push your skills beyond the basics.
You’ll have fun building real-world projects from scratch, including Git, Docker, Redis, Kafka, SQLite, Grep, BitTorrent, HTTP Server, an Interpreter, and DNS.
The courses are self-paced, so you can learn at your own speed.
If you’re itching to level up your Rust skills, these courses are perfect for you.
Here’s what makes CodeCrafters stand out:
Learn by building projects that challenge you beyond just implementing CRUD features.
Strengthen your fundamentals by working on awesome low-level projects.
Get really good at reading and writing idiomatic Rust code.
Plus, take part in monthly contests for a chance to win exciting prizes.
You can get your CodeCrafters fees fully reimbursed through your corporate Learning & Development (L&D) budget.
Be sure to check with your employer about tapping into your L&D budget to save money and make this a no-brainer opportunity to level up your skills.
Don't take our word for it. See what others have to say. [affiliate]
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This week had been a blast, we learnt that we should have our own stickers and merch for future conference events.
That's all for now, Rustaceans.
John & Elley.