Rust with Niko Matsakis

Few developers have been as influential to my career as Niko Matsakis. Of course he is a world-class engineer with a PhD from ETH Zürich, a Rust core maintainer who has been working on the language for way more than a decade, and a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS. But more importantly, he is an empathetic human and an exceptional communicator. I've personally been waiting for one year to get him on the show and steal one hour of his precious time. Now, finally, I got my chance at live recording at Rust Week 2025. The result is everything I hoped for: a trip down memory lane which takes us back to the early days of Rust, an honest and personal look at Rust's strengths and weaknesses, and a glimpse into the future of the language. All of that packed with insightful anecdotes based on Niko's decades of experience. If you like Rust, you will enjoy this episode. About Rust Rust is the language which brought us all together. What started as a side-project of Graydon Hoare, a single developer at Mozilla, has grown into a worldwide community of hobbyists, professionals, and companies which all share the same goal: to build better, safer software paired with great ergonomics and performance. About Niko Matsakis Niko is a long-time Rust core team member, having joined the project in 2012. He was and still is part of the team which designed and implemented Rust's borrow checker, which is the language's most important feature. He has been a voice of reason and a guiding light for many of us, including myself. His insightful talks and blog posts have helped countless developers to see the language and its goals in a new light. Special Thanks Thanks to RustNL, the organizers of Rust Week 2025 for inviting Simon and me to record this episode live. They did a fantastic job organizing the event, and it was an honor to be part of it. 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Learn hands-on by creating your own shell, HTTP server, Redis, Kafka, Git, SQLite, or DNS service from scratch. Start for free today and enjoy 40% off any paid plan by using this link.  Links From The Episode RustWeek 2025 - Rust conference in Utrecht where we recorded this live episodeDataPower - Niko's employer before working on RustXSLT - Language to transform arbitrarily shaped XML into different arbitrary shapesETH Zürich - Niko's Alma MaterMozilla - Niko's first employer while working on Rustrustboot - Rust's first compiler written in OCamlDon Quixote - Personification of impractical idealism, just like Rust was in the beginningSteve Klabnik's FOSDEM talk - Coining "The Graydon years", Slides, Recording of the same talk for ACMRust 0.2 Keywords - ret for return, cont for continueBoxes in Rust 0.8 - ~T and @T as syntax features instead of Box<T> and Rc<T>Green Threads - Like OS threads, but greener!std::threads - Not green, just part of the standard librarystd::rc::Rc - The @T of stdstd::boxed::Box - The ~T of std with some special compiler saucestd::sync::Arc - Thread safe Rcpyo3::Py - A pointer type in a different library!The Rust Book: Understanding Ownership - Ownership and borrowing are the first third of "the simple core of Rust"The Rust Book: Using Trait Objects - Trait-based dispatch being the second part of "the simple core of Rust"std::marker::Send - A trait without even a method to dispatch, aptly placed in the marker modulestd::marker::Sync - Another example of a marker traitLinear Type Systems - Foundational research topic for borrowing in Rustregex - "Real stuff" built in Rustrayon - Turning iterators into parallel processingTokio Async Runtime - An entire async ecosystem as a perfomant libraryComment on RFC 2394 - The beginning of the await x / x.await discussion?Alex Crichton - Rust compiler, wasm, and lang-advisors team membercramertj - Rust lang-advisors and libs-contributors team memberwithoutboats - Rust team alumniCarl Lerche - tokio maintaineraturon - Rust team alumniALGOL 60 - Doesn't look like Ctry blocks - Do we need a postfix match operator for this?Rust Blog: Announcing Rust 1.31 and Rust 2018 - A watershed moment for RustNon-lexical lifetimes - Included in 1.31 and Rust 2018Santiago Pastorino - Rust compiler contributor, worked on non-lexical lifetimesMakefile Example - "We don't need cargo, Make is fine"Rust Blog: Laying the foundation for Rust's future - Mozilla's parting gift to Rust?Tyler Mandry - Rust lang team co-lead with NikoJosh Triplett - Rust lang, cargo, and libs team memberAmazon S3 Express One Zone storage class - Super low latency S3, written in RustAmazon Aurora DSQL - Serverless SQL, an AWS project that started 100% in JVM and finished 100% RustJust make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story - Blog post detailing the Aurora DSQL Rust rewriteRust in 2025: Targeting foundational software - Niko's vision for RustBe excellent to each other - Party on dudes! Official Links Rust LanguageRust FoundationNiko Matsakis' HomepageNiko Matsakis on GitHub