Rust Forum Sneak Preview with Niko Matsakis

Ahead of the Rust Forum on 24 May, we sat down Niko Matsakis to talk about the popularity of Rust, the future of the language, and the talk he's most excited for at the Rust Forum.

According to the 2021 StackOverflow developer survey, Rust is the 'most loved' technology. Why do you think Rust language is so popular?

People love Rust because it empowers them to do more. Rust achieves that by focusing on being reliable, performant, and supportive:

Reliable — programs tend to do what they’re supposed to. Many Rust programmers talk about this feeling of “once it compiles, it tends to work; and if it doesn’t work, the bug is usually a logic bug”. This also means that refactoring is easy. The type system is rich enough that you can use it to express more than just basic properties of your program; it can actually help you to catch logic bugs as well.

Performant – our goal is that idiomatic Rust is also the most performant way to write Rust. Higher-level idioms like iterators compile down to low-level code, but can often run faster than if you had written that low-level code by hand, because they can encode optimizations that are derived from having more structure (e.g., iterators can skip bounds checks when accessing a vector – the structure of an iterator guarantees you only access in-bounds data).

Supportive – we try to be practical and help you to get things done. We have a great ecosystem. We build strong tools and focus on polish details like error messages that try to not only tell you THAT there is a problem but to TEACH you why it isn’t working and how to fix it.

Why do you think the demand for Rust developers is skyrocketing?

There are a few trends converging —

1. CPUs aren’t getting faster, just more parallel. To get strong performance, you need languages like Rust that not only improve single-processor performance, they help you to write parallel programs that actually work.
2. Running hosted code in a data center or in the cloud means that performance directly affects your company’s bottom line. When your program gets 10% faster, you can serve 10% more customers at the same cost. That’s a big deal.
3. If code is not running in a data center, more and more it’s running on a phone – in that case, performance matters also for battery life.
4. Rust can fill niches that previously required C or C++:
   1. Portable “core logic” that can be shipped on Android, iOS, and desktop applications or the cloud; similarly, core logic that can be packaged up in an SDK for multiple programmers
   2. Kernels and low-level embedded programming

What do you see is the future outlook for the Rust Programming Language?

Pithy answer: see my talk.

Medium answer: Rust has been on a continual trend since 2015 of getting both more capable and easier to use all at once, and we intend to keep pushing hard on that vein.

Expanded answer: see my blog post.

What advantages does Rust have over a language like Python?

Reliability and performance, clearly. But I do want to emphasize, Python is a great language, and it’s not really an “either or” choice. A lot of people combine Rust with other languages like Python, e.g., by factoring out some core logic, or by moving some portion of their code into a microservice written in Rust that interfaces with the Python code.

How can an aspiring Rust Developer best get started?

The official Rust book is always a great starting point. For people who like a more “hands on” approach, Rustlings and Rust by Example may be a good option. And of course there are more and more books every day – the O’Reilly book, for example, is another popular choice.

Skills Matter is hosting the Rust Forum event in May 2022. Which speaker are you most looking forward to hearing from and why?

Async I/O is a big focus of mine these days – it is very relevant to the cloud, both in terms of implementing cloud infrastructure but also deploying code that either runs on the cloud or interacts with it. I’m really interested to hear what Kartharina Fey has to say about it!