Highlights from This Week in Rust - Issue
444. This
week features a juicy post-mortem, open source, open hardware, and lots of news
from around the Rust ecosystem.



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Timestamps & referenced resources



[@00:00] Welcome


[@00:10] - Introduction
[@00:50] - Agenda
[@01:23] - Quote of the week

This is the difference in approaches of the two languages. In C++ if the
code is vulnerable, the blame is on the programmer. In Rust if the code is
vulnerable, Rust considers it a failure of the language, and takes
responsibility to stop even “bad” programmers from writing vulnerable code.
I can’t stress enough how awesome it is that I can be a careless fool, and
still write perfectly robust highly multi-threaded code that never crashes.


[@03:09] Allen: Rust is both good and bad at marketing


[@03:30] - Crate of the week

[@04:15] - Tim and Sean discuss parsing in episode
2022-05-26 at 47:10




[@05:10] Official Notices


[@05:22] - Announcing Rust 1.61.0

Custom exit codes from main

[Note from Tim: I say “termination crate”, but should have said “Termination trait”.]


More capabilities for const fn

“Basic” handling of fn pointers
Add trait bounds to a const fn
dyn trait and impl Trait support


Stdio handles can be locked directly
Several stabilized APIs




[@08:07] Highlights


[@08:27] - Developer survey: JavaScript and Python reign, but Rust is rising

[@09:09] - Sean: “Rust adoption has nearly quadrupled in the last two years, going from
600k developers in Q1 2022 to 2.2m in Q1 2022.”


[@13:00] - Redust by Will Nelson

[@13:50] Allen: I think the comments are actually more interesting. They
are starting to point to something really—I don’t know whether it’s
good or bad for the community—where, you know, people start rolling
their own crates instead of, say, doing stuff upstream. It kind of goes back
to what Tim was complaining about before [Easy Mode for
Rust, discussed on This Week in Rust - Issue 441]—well, lightly
pointing out to people out there—that okay, now which crate should I
use?
[@16:20] Tim: Open source is really complicated. You need to talk to
people. That’s … challenging. [Laughs]
[@16:40] Josh Triplett on Building with
Rust,
discussing the orphan rule
[@16:50] Sean: Rust is not very good at sharing between crates.


[@19:07] - Rust: A Critical
Retrospective by bunnie

Links

The Hardware Hacker, bunnie’s autobiography
[video] “Shenzhen: An Alternative to the American way of
Innovation”
[@28:56] A Programmer’s Brain, by Felienne Hermans, about working memory
in programmers.


[@19:58] - Hacking the Xbox book
[@20:04] - [video] Linux.conf.au 2013
keynote
discussing Chumby and creating a hardware startup
[@20:20] - betrusted.io, a secure communications system that
runs the Xous microkernel operating system
[@21:07] - Tim: Security-critical applications have issues when they … rely on Rust.
There’s one quote I want to pull out of the post, which is: “I’m not sure
if there is even a good solution to this problem, but, if you are
super-paranoid and your goal is to be able to build trustable firmware, be
wary of Rust’s expansive software supply chain attack surface!”
[@26:09] - Sean: bunnie I think that you are absolutely, totally, qualified.
[@30:17] - Allen: I did see a macro that he put in there. … I forget
extact. It was very crazy and I was like, “Come on, no one’s every going to
write something crazy like this” and then I took a look at the RFC that
Sean’s gonna do and in the comments there was a crazy one like that and I
was like, “oh wow, this guy’s point’s valid”.
[@30:49] - Hyrum’s Law, named after Hyrum
Wright.

With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you
promise in t