Rust in Production

There's a particular kind of pressure that comes with maintaining software at the very bottom of someone else's stack. ClickHouse lives in exactly that spot: roughly 1.5 million lines of mostly C++ and tens of millions of tests every single day.So what happens when you start introducing Rust into a codebase like that? Not as a rewrite, but linked into a C++ server with a CMake build process that has to be reproducible and FIPS compliant? In today's episode, we get into the messy, interesting reality. We talk about the question of whether the hardest part is Rust the language or Rust the ecosystem.My guests come at this from two very different angles. Alexey Milovidov is the creator of ClickHouse and its CTO. He started the project back in 2009 and has spent decades thinking about performance, correctness, and what it actually takes to build a production database. Austin Bonander is a Senior Software Engineer at ClickHouse and a renowned open-source maintainer of sqlx. He works close to the Rust tooling and the CLI. Together we talk about where Rust fits inside a C++ monolith, what it would take for Rust to earn a rewrite of core components, supply-chain and compliance headaches, and whether Rust is heading for the same accumulation of regrets that every "trendy" language eventually accumulates.

Are you one of over 240 million subscribers of Amazon's Prime Video service? If so, you might be surprised to learn that much of the infrastructure behind Prime Video is built using Rust. They use a single codebase for media players, game consoles, and tablets. In this episode, we sit down with Alexandru Ene, a Principal Engineer at Amazon, to discuss how Rust is used at Prime Video, the challenges they face in building a global streaming service, and the benefits of using Rust for their systems.

As a kid, I was always fascinated by space tech. That fascination has only grown as I've learned more about the engineering challenges involved in space exploration.In this episode, we talk to Vegard Sandengen, a Rust engineer at KSAT, a company that provides ground station services for satellites. They use Rust to manage the data flow from hundreds of satellites, ensuring that data is received, processed, and stored efficiently. This data is then made available to customers around the world, enabling them to make informed decisions based on real-time satellite data.We dive deep into the technical challenges of building reliable, high-performance systems that operate 24/7 to capture and process satellite data. Vegard shares insights into why Rust was chosen for these mission-critical systems, how they handle the massive scale of data processing, and the unique reliability requirements when dealing with space-based infrastructure.From ground station automation to data pipeline optimization, this conversation explores how modern systems programming languages are enabling the next generation of space technology infrastructure.

In today's episode, I talk to Adam Hendel, the founding engineer of Tembo, about their project, PGMQ, and how it came to be. We discuss the design decisions behind job queues, interfacing from Rust to Postgres, and the engineering decisions that went into building the extension.

Up until a few years ago, Python tooling was a nightmare: basic tasks like installing packages or managing Python versions was a pain. The tools were brittle and did not work well together, mired in a swamp of underspecified implementation defined behaviour.Then, apparently suddenly, but in reality backed by years of ongoing work on formal interoperability specifications, we saw a renaissance of new ideas in the Python ecosystem. It started with Poetry and pipx and continued with tooling written in Rust like rye, which later got incorporated into Astral. Astral in particular contributed a very important piece to the puzzle: uv – an extremely fast Python package and project manager that supersedes all previous attempts; For example, it is 10x-100x faster than pip.  In this episode I talk to Charlie Marsh, the Founder and CEO of Astral. We talk about Astral’s mission and how Rust plays an important role in it.

Victor Ciura is a veteran C++ developer who worked on Visual C++ and the Clang Power Tools. In this first episode of season 4, we talk to him about large-scale Rust adoption at Microsoft.Victor works as a Principal Engineer on the Rust team in Microsoft's Developer Division, building the compiler toolchain and libraries needed for the broader Rust efforts across the organization. He is a regular speaker at conferences like CPPCon and also spoke at EuroRust 2024.We talk about Microsoft's first steps with Rust, widespread implementation across key products and services, and Hyrum's Law.

The car industry is not known for its rapid adoption of new technologies. Therefore, it's even more exciting to see a company like Volvo Cars embracing Rust for core components of their software stack.We talked to Julius Gustavsson, System Architect at Volvo Cars, about the use of Rust for their Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in Volvo's EX90 and Polestar 3 models and how they are building a Rust ecosystem within the company.