About this episode

In this episode, Gergely Orosz interviews Alice Ryhl about the unique features of the Rust programming language and its community.

Brought to You By: • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. • Sentry ⁠ – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers • ⁠ Craft Conference ⁠ : join Gergely, Kent Beck, Hillel Wayne and others at the conference dedicated to the art and science of software delivery craft. — Rust is one of the most admired programming languages around – and also one of the hardest to learn. What makes developers stick with it? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, I sit down with Alice Ryhl, a software engineer on Google’s Android Rust team, and a core maintainer of Tokio, which is the most widely-used async runtime in Rust. We discuss what makes Rust different from other languages like TypeScript, Go, and C++, and why so many developers say that “once it compiles, it works.” We go deep into memory safety, ownership, borrowing, unsafe Rust, and Cargo. We also cover how Rust is governed by RFCs, feature flags, its six-week release cycle, how engineers get paid to work on the language, and also look into how Rust’s use inside the Linux kernel is progressing. —…

People in this episode

Host: Gergely Orosz

Guest: Alice Ryhl

Topics covered

• Rust programming language
• memory safety
• ownership
• async runtime
• software engineering
• programming languages

Keywords

• Rust
• memory safety
• ownership
• async
• programming
• Tokio
• C++
• TypeScript
• Garbage collection

Sponsors

Antithesis, Sentry, Craft Conference

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Google, Tokio, Linux

Products: Antithesis, Sentry

More episodes of The Pragmatic Engineer

• Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower · June 3, 2026 · 2h 51m
• Building OpenCode with Dax Raad · May 27, 2026 · 1h 20m
• TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsberg · May 13, 2026 · 1h 15m

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Pragmatic Engineer podcast page.