Zed’s Debugger Is Here to Save Your Sanity
Today’s Issue: Become a Better Rust Engineer, Rewriting Kafka in Rust Async, and Migrating off Legacy Tokio at Scale
Hello, Rustaceans.
Welcome to another edition of the Rust Bytes newsletter.
In this issue, we’ll discuss Zed’s latest debugging feature, present a Rust challenge, spotlight an amazing Rust project, and share some incredible links of the week.
Here’s issue 72 for you!
THE MAIN NEWS
Zed’s Debugger Is Here to Save Your Sanity
While we were firing up BBQs for Father’s Day and Juneteenth, Anthony Eid, Piotr Osiewicz, Conrad Irwin, and the Zed team dropped a huge surprise: debugging in Zed is now live, and it’s a big step toward their 1.0 stable release.
Looking at their 1.0 roadmap, they’ve already nailed 4 out of 10 planned features, with 3 more brewing in the dev pipeline. Their latest debugging feature is the result of eight months of work and it’s a game-changer for sure.
The standout addition is locators, which seamlessly converts build configurations into debug setups, sparing you the pain of endless JSON tweaking.
They also smartly tackled the Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) by creating a two-layer architecture (data and UI) and opening their extension API, making it easy for community developers, and you to integrate their preferred debuggers.
Here’s the scoop on why Zed’s Debugger is awesome:
Set Breakpoints and Snoop Like a Pro - You can plop breakpoints anywhere, dig into threads, variables, and call stacks with zero hassle. It’s like getting a backstage pass to your code’s drama, catching bugs in Rust, C/C++, JS, Go, or Python.
Locators That Save Your Sanity - Zed’s locators auto-flip your build tasks into debug configs. Write a tasks.json once, and you’re debugging Cargo, Python, or JS faster than you can rage-quit a bad merge.
Keyboard-Only Mode for Your Inner Wizard - You can step through code, toggle breakpoints, and navigate sessions without touching that mouse. Zed’s got your back, letting you flex those Vim-level keyboard chops.
Tweak the UI to Match Your Vibe - You can drag tabs, shuffle panels, and remap keybindings to make the debugger your personal coding dojo. It’s like rearranging your IDE to procrastinate, but actually useful.
Why should you care? Zed’s debugger is a major leap toward 1.0 and general dev experience, delivering a fast, extensible, and Electron-free experience that minimizes lag and maximizes productivity.
If this release doesn't convince you to switch from your current editor to Zed, you may want to wait for the 1.0 stable release.
RUST CHALLENGE🦀
Last week, we shared a macro that reads the content of a file at compile time, and embeds it as a &'static str. We also shared scenarios where you might need it.
Let’s move on to this week’s challenge.
Number Spiral
Given a positive integer n, generate an n x n spiral matrix filled with numbers from 1 to n² in a clockwise spiral pattern, starting from the top-left corner.
Your function generate_spiral should return the matrix as a vector of vectors.
The spiral moves right, down, left, and up, filling the matrix layer by layer.
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 💡
Zizmor
Zizmor is a tool designed scan GitHub Actions workflows for security vulnerabilities, safeguarding your CI/CD pipelines.
It tackles a variety of security vulnerabilities commonly found in GitHub Actions configurations, helping you and your team mitigate risks that could compromise your project.
It’s like a safety scanner for your automated development processes, helping to spot problems that could expose your projects to risks.
By addressing such vulnerabilities, Zizmor ensures that your GitHub Actions workflows are effective against a variety of threats.
Here is the lowdown on their amazing feature set:
Comprehensive Audit Suite - Zizmor includes various audits, covering issues from template injections to cache poisoning and insecure commands. Each audit is designed to identify specific vulnerabilities, ensuring thorough coverage.
Actionable Remediation Guidance - Beyond detecting issues, Zizmor provides clear remediation steps for each finding, allowing you to resolve vulnerabilities quickly and effectively.
Configurable Personas - Zizmor offers three analysis modes - Regular for high-signal findings, Pedantic for additional code smells, and Auditor for exhaustive checks - allowing you to tailor the tool to their needs, whether for daily use or in-depth security audits.
Cross-Platform Accessibility - Available on crates.io and packaged for various platforms (e.g., Arch Linux, Fedora), Zizmor is easily accessible to users across different environments.
Zizmor is an indispensable tool for any team using GitHub Actions, providing a proper solution to the complex security challenges of CI/CD pipelines.
They even secured sponsorships from Astral (the team building awesome Python tooling with Rust) and Grafana Labs to fuel their efforts.
Check out the project on GitHub at https://github.com/zizmorcore/zizmor.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK 🔗
The Rust team has released the 2025 Rust Compiler Performance Survey, and the Clippy team also announced a 12-week "feature freeze" starting June 26, 2025, with the Rust 1.89.0 beta release to September 18th 2025.
Trifecta Tech Foundation wrote about bzip2 crate switch from C to 100% Rust, highlighting performance and seamless cross-compilation. Notable changes includes improved compression/decompression speeds, support for MIRI testing, resolved symbol conflicts, and it passed an audit with minimal issues.
Tim McNamara (aka Tim Clicks) interviewed Guillaume Gomez and talked about his open-source journey, including work on Rust’s compiler, Servo, Clippy, and GCC, while emphasizing sustainable contribution practices. [video]
Malware Decoded's article on “Windows API Hooking with Rust on Windows ARM” outlines naive and trampoline hooking to intercept function calls. He covers practical examples like hooking TerminateProcess for EDR protection and Sleep for sandbox evasion, detailing detour jumps, instruction patching, and trampoline generation.
Arian Farid's article “Bitwise DNA Compression in Rust” details a Rust-based 4-bit DNA compression system, halving storage for massive genomic data using bitwise rotation, it doubles the speed of generating complementary base pairs, ideal for bioinformatics pipelines.
Brandon Greenwell open-sourced lstr, a fast, sleek directory tree viewer written in Rust.
Rex Wang rewrote Kafka in Rust, creating StoneMQ - a high-performance, lightweight message queue. Check out his writeup “Rewriting Kafka in Rust Async” for juicy insights and clever lessons learned.
The Rust nerds at Slint have released v1.12 with improvements such as WGPU support for 3D graphics integration with Bevy, iOS tech-preview enabling Rust apps to cross-compile for iPhone and iPad, and Figma Variables integration for consistent UI design tokens.
Ronny Chan from Okta authored “Migrating off legacy Tokio at scale”, sharing the epic migration of their Workflows engine (100k+ lines) from clunky Tokio 0.1 to sleek async/await Tokio 1.0, slashing 20k lines of code without halting features or service.
Ivan's "Writing a Linux driver from scratch" chronicles their wild ride crafting a driver for the Nanoleaf Pegboard Desk Dock’s RGB LEDs. With no Linux driver or USB know-how, they wield Rust and libusb to crack the protocol, tame interrupts, and drop quirky wisdom!
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:
You learn by building projects that challenge you beyond just implementing CRUD features.
Strengthen your fundamentals by working on awesome low-level projects.
You’ll get really good at reading and writing idiomatic Rust code.
Plus, you 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.
Check with your employer about using your L&D budget for CodeCrafters to save money and make this a no-brainer opportunity to level up your skills.
Get 40% off when you sign up here. [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 had a crazy week but also got a lot of things done. Wishing you a good week ahead.
That's all for now, Rustaceans.
John & Elley.