Interview with Steve Klabnik

The Story of Rust

Q: Could you briefly introduce yourself?

Hi there, I’m Steve. waves.

I am a human in a constant state of flux, like many of us. This current iteration of me features:

Lots of GitHub. This says I’ve done over two thousand bits of contribution in the past year.

Lots of Rust.

Lots of Netrunner.

Q: What will your talk be about, exactly? Why this topic?

I’ll be talking about Rust and its journey to 1.0. Rust is a highly anticipated new programming language, and now, around the time it’s finally shipping, is a good chance to get a bit of a retrospective.

Q: What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect?

I’d love for people to give Rust a try.

Q: In which domains does Rust shine? And what are currently its weak points?

Rust is really great when you can’t afford a garbage collector. It can go just as low as C and C++ can, but is much, much more safe.

Rust’s weakest point is that its domain is difficult, and so the language can be a bit tough to get started with.

Q: Could you give some examples of projects that are developed in Rust?

One great example is Rust itself! The compiler is written in Rust.

Another is Cargo, Rust’s package manager. Its website, Crates.io also uses Rust on the back end.

Skylight is one of the first production users of Rust. Their Ruby gem you install on your site is Rust on the inside.

Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust.

Q: Is Rust easy to learn? Which programming language background do you recommend for someone who wants to try Rust?

Rust is easy to get started with, but can be a bit confusing depending on your background. Rust blends approaches from many domains, so if you come from C++, the advanced type system stuff might be hard. If you come from Haskell, the low-level stuff may seem strange.

I think anyone coming from a C++ background will find Rust easy to understand. Lots of people from languages like Ruby, Python, and JavaScript are finding that Rust is a good excuse to learn low-level programming, so that’s another way to do it.

Q: Which new features can we expect in Rust this year?

The big one is 1.0. :) Finally, some stability! We don’t have a schedule set in stone for post 1.0, though we have some ideas!

Q: Have you enjoyed previous FOSDEM editions?

This will be my first FOSDEM!