Ubuntu's Rusty Revolution
Today’s Issue: Rust’s 10th Birthday, How To Get a Rust Job, and the Three Basic Rules of Safety Hygiene
Hello Rustaceans!
Welcome to another edition of the Rust Bytes newsletter.
In this issue, we’ll look at Ubuntu’s move to sudo-rs, challenge you with a puzzle, spotlight an amazing Rust project, and share some incredible links of the week.
Here’s issue 66 for you!
A Message for You
Ten years, can you believe it? It feels like just yesterday we were all trying to figure out what a "borrow checker" was (and let's be honest, some of us still are).
This week, we’re celebrating a happy 10th birthday to Rust stable 1.0. Here's to a decade of memory safety, fearless concurrency, and enough angle brackets to make a mathematician blush.
Let's raise a (perfectly type-safe) glass to the next ten years of building amazing things without segfaulting into oblivion.
Now, onto our main thing.
THE MAIN THING
Ubuntu's Rusty Revolution
Last week was eventful: Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of the United States was elected Pope Leo XIV, and Ubuntu announced a shift to sudo-rs, sparking discussions on the effectiveness of the move. Some people are optimistic while others are not so happy about this move.
Now, let’s dive into what this shift entails.
Ubuntu’s making history as the first major Linux distro to swap the classic sudo for sudo-rs, a Rust rewrite, starting with Ubuntu v25.10. Partnered with the Trifecta Tech Foundation, this move promises memory-safe privilege escalation without breaking your workflow. It’s like swapping a rusty wrench for a shiny new one - same job, fewer tetanus shots.
Ubuntu’s not stopping at sudo, they’re sponsoring uutils, a Rust-based rewrite of coreutils, for v25.10. With SELinux and internationalization support in the works, commands like mv and ls are getting a memory-safe makeover. Because nothing says ‘secure’ like ls that won’t segfault your soul.
Then there’s SequoiaPGP, a Rust-based OpenPGP library that’s got Ubuntu’s attention as a GnuPG alternative for APT. With GnuPG maintainers forking the OpenPGP standard into non-compliance, SequoiaPGP’s strict, modern approach feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s still early days, but the prospect of a safer, Rust-powered package manager is tantalizing.
Ubuntu’s testing the waters in v25.10 before committing to it in the v26.04 LTS, and they’re sponsoring extras like AppArmor profile control and shell escape prevention to keep things airtight.
They’re even ensuring sudo-rs works on older Linux kernels (like those in Ubuntu v20.04 LTS) to avoid container-related headaches.
While the shift to sudo-rs doesn't introduce major new features, it significantly reduces the attack surface for sudo-rs as a drop-in replacement. Ubuntu’s Rust revolution is just warming up, and we’re here for it.
RUST CHALLENGE 🦀
Last week, we had you solve the integer-to-alphanumeric conversion challenge.
Thanks to Luciano Mammino, Nothing, Serpent7776, and Rishabh who shared their solutions to the challenge. You rock! 🤘
Let's move on to this week’s challenge.
Can you predict what will be printed in the code shown below?
Please share your solution and tag us either on X, BlueSky, Mastodon, or reply to this email.
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT 💡
SlateDB
SlateDB is an embedded storage engine designed as a log-structured merge-tree (LSM-tree) that uses the power of object storage systems like S3, GCS, ABS, MinIO, and Tigris.
Unlike LSM-tree storage engines that rely on local disk storage, SlateDB writes data to object storage, offering virtually unlimited storage capacity, high durability, and seamless replication.
This cloud-native approach makes SlateDB a compelling choice for developers building scalable, resilient applications.
SlateDB stands out for its unique combination of features and forward-thinking design:
Cloud-Native Architecture - By building on object storage, SlateDB embraces the cloud era, providing a storage engine that aligns with modern infrastructure trends and eliminates the need for managing local disks.
Performance Optimizations - SlateDB tackles object storage latency and cost issues with smart batching for writes and advanced caching for reads, ensuring efficient performance for both read and write operations.
Flexible and Extensible - With support for any object storage implementing the ObjectStore trait, SlateDB is highly adaptable to various environments. Its API supports essential operations like get, put, delete, and range queries, with plans for advanced features like transactions and merge operators.
SlateDB is poised to redefine embedded storage for cloud-native applications, combining the robustness of LSM-tree architecture with the scalability of object storage.
Check out slatedb on GitHub at https://github.com/slatedb/slatedb.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK 🔗
Rustup v1.28.2 got released with changes such as deprecating the cURL and native-tls TLS backends to standardize on reqwest and rustls for improved security and maintenance.
Jack Wrenn wrote about “The Three Basic Rules of Safety Hygiene”, advocating for better digital "flossing" to prevent memory mayhem.
Gavin Gray from Cognitive Engineering Lab released Argu (An Interactive Debugger for Rust Trait Errors) that visualizes the trait inference tree, offering bottom-up and top-down views, clickable trait bounds, abbreviated types/paths, and implementation lists.
Filtra's "How To Get A Rust Job Part I" compiles insights from a Rust developer survey, sharing strategies and takeaways to help you secure your first or next Rust job.
RustWeek 2025 is happening this week. It’s a full week of Rust in Utrecht, NL with talks, workshops, hackathon, socials, Rust’s 10th bday bash, and the first Rust All Hands since 2019. [conference]
Trifecta Tech Foundation wrote about “Memory-safe sudo to become the default in Ubuntu”, emphasizing their collaboration with Canonical to adopt sudo-rs, a memory-safe reimplementation of sudo, enhancing system resilience.
Bersis Sevimli open-sourced feather, a Rust web framework inspired by Express.js that avoids async for simplicity.
Matthias Endler from Corrode blogged about "Flattening Rust's Learning Curve", offering practical advice for learning Rust by embracing its unique concepts like ownership and lifetimes, and writing code manually to build intuition.
Gustavo Noronha wrote “Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust (by showing me C++)”.
Yoshua Wuyts in his article “Automatic interleaving of high-level concurrent operations” critiques the lack of support for reordering high-level concurrent operations in Rust, proposing a Swift-inspired .co.await notation to enable automatic concurrent scheduling.
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]
SUPPORT RUST BYTES
You’re Rust Bytes’ biggest fans, and we love to see it.
Here’s how you can help spread the word:
❤️ Recommend Rust Bytes to your friends.
🤳 Connect with us on our socials: X, BlueSky, Mastodon, Publication.
☕️ Support our editors by buying us coffee.
📨 Email us at rustaceanseditors@gmail.com for sponsorship, feedback or ideas.
I am half-way through my yearly reading goal and it seems more can be done with good habits.
That's all for now, Rustaceans.
John & Elley.