What’s Next for Rerun
Today’s Issue: Become a Better Rust Engineer, You Should Test Everything, and Rust Is Indeed Woke.
Wishing you a productive end to March, Rustaceans! 🦀
Welcome to another edition of the Rust Bytes Newsletter.
In this issue, we’ll discuss what’s next for Rerun, challenge you to solve the word ladder problem, spotlight an amazing Rust project, and share some incredible links of the week.
Here’s issue 60 for you!
THE MAIN THING
What’s Next for Rerun
Rerun, a Rust-based open-source tool for visualizing and managing multimodal data, recently raised $17M in seed funding to build a comprehensive data platform for Physical AI.
When we first wrote about them in our 18th issue, they were a young team with bold ambitions and an impressive product.
Fast forward to today, and they’re already proving just how far their vision can reach.
They have built the most popular open-source framework for logging and visualizing multimodal data, earning adoption from industry leaders like Meta, Google, Hugging Face's LeRobot, and Unitree.
Now, with this new funding, they’re doubling down on their mission to accelerate Physical AI innovation.
Their infrastructure aims to bridge the gap between online systems (running live on robots) and offline systems (analyzing and enhancing that data), addressing the unique needs of Physical AI.
Rerun's target applications span robotics, autonomous vehicles, spatial and embodied AI, generative media, industrial processing, simulation, security, and healthcare - areas where managing complex, time-evolving spatial data is critical.
By offering a consistent data model and a database that natively understands both raw logs and structured datasets, Rerun empowers teams to iterate faster, run high-quality experiments, and ship products more efficiently.
Rerun’s open-source visualization tool remains a cornerstone, while the new cloud data platform promises seamless observability and powerful querying capabilities.
Their approach bridges the gap between traditional robotics tools and modern machine learning pipelines, solving a core challenge in Physical AI.
With the clear vision, a growing community, and fresh resources to execute, they’re well-positioned to shape the next wave of innovation in the physical world.
We can’t help but wonder how the future of Physical AI will unfold with Rerun leading the charge.
Kudos to Emil, Nikolaus, Moritz, and the entire Rerun team for their incredible work. Wishing you all the best as you continue to push the boundaries of Physical AI.
RUST CHALLENGE 🦀
Last week, we had you reverse a word in-place without reallocation.
Kudos to decebaldobrica.eth, Patrick, Serpent7776, Chrom!Sevy, nilcoalesce, Smukx.E, punpun, and Abeeujah who shared their solutions to the challenge. You rock! 🤘
Let's move on to this week’s challenge.
The Word Ladder
You’re tasked with building a word game feature where players transform one word into another by changing one letter at a time, with each step being a valid word.
Given a start word, an end word, and a dictionary of valid words, write a function to find the shortest "ladder" (sequence of words) from start to end.
For simplicity, assume all words are the same length.
Test 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 💡
Flowistry
Flowistry is a Rust tool that analyzes the information flow of Rust programs.
Flowistry understands whether it's possible for one piece of code to affect another. It integrates into your IDE to provide a "focus mode" which helps you focus on the code that's related to your current task.
Issues Flowistry Aims to Solve
Rust, with its emphasis on safety and performance, often results in codebases that are dense with intricate relationships between variables, references, and functions.
Flowistry tackles these head-on by introducing a dataflow-aware lens for Rust.
It uses the Rust compiler’s Mid-level Intermediate Representation (MIR) to compute precise information flow, enabling developers to see only what’s relevant.
Features That Make Flowistry Fun
Flowistry’s standout feature is its ability to visually highlight code that influences or is influenced by a selected variable or expression, while fading out irrelevant sections.
Available as a VSCode plugin, Flowistry integrates seamlessly into a familiar workflow. The ease of toggling focus mode with shortcuts (e.g., Ctrl+R Ctrl+A) or the context menu adds a layer of convenience that makes experimenting with it enjoyable.
Built on a PLDI 2022 paper, its evolving nature as a research project adds an element of discovery - users get to play with something that’s still being refined, almost like beta-testing a feature.
Flowistry feels like having a magnifying glass for Rust programs, letting you zoom in on what’s relevant while dimming the rest, all within the comfort of your IDE.
Flowistry is open-source on GitHub at https://github.com/willcrichton/flowistry.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK 🔗
Microsoft released hyperlight-wasm, a Rust-based Hyperlight virtual machine (VM) that can run wasm component workloads written in many programming languages.
Jakub Beránek wrote a compelling case on why you should test everything, spotlighting Rust’s knack for turning bug-hunting into a satisfying victory lap.
Niko Matsakis' article Dyn you have idea for `dyn`? discusses the limitations of Rust's dyn Trait, proposing improvements for runtime polymorphism and code size reduction. Please read it.
The Ferrous Systems team donated the Ferrocene Language Specification to the Rust Project - well done, Ferrous team!
Alex Gaynor’s Notes on coreutils in Rust discusses Canonical’s bold decision to adopt Rust-based coreutils for Ubuntu, arguing it’s less about memory safety or speed and more about how a small rewrite can spark big wins down the line.
The brilliant minds at FastLab open-sourced fastrace, - a fast, modern crate for distributed tracing in Rust.
Christian Visintin blogged about Vendoring C/C++ dependencies in Rust, detailing how to statically bundle C/C++ libraries into Rust projects.
Ian Jackson, in his piece “Rust is indeed woke,” argues that Rust embodies "woke" values by emphasizing community empowerment, systemic support for programmers, and memory safety, thereby challenging the traditional power structures and the individualistic "rockstar" ideology dominant in C/C++ programming culture.
The talented Rustaceans at ScyllaDB have officially released ScyllaDB Rust Driver 1.0.
Jared Jacobson's Fastest Vec Update on My Computer is the article that'll make your vector optimization blazingly fast. Basically, you can delete your other optimization bookmarks now.
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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My daughter turned a month old a few days ago, and she is growing so fast.
That's all for now, Rustaceans.
John & Elley.