Rust Isn't a Panacea for Memory Leaks

Highlights from This Week in Rust - Issue 446, presented by Allen and Tim, with Nell Shamrell-Harrington, co-hosting for the first time in 2022.

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Timestamps & referenced resources

[@00:00:00] Welcome

• [@00:00:10] - Introduction
• [@00:00:52] - Agenda
• [@00:01:27] - Interview with Nell Shamrell-Harrington about editing This Week in Rust
  • [@00:06:21] Submitting an article to This week in Rust
  • TWIR Github Repository github.com/rust-lang/this-week-in-rust
  • TWIR Twitter account @thisweekinrust
  • [@00:07:42] Call for volunteers to co-host an episode
• [@00:08:38] - Quote of the week

  I wrote a bespoke time-series database in Rust a few years ago, and it has had exactly one issue since I stood it up in production, and that was due to pessimistic filesystem access patterns, rather than the language. This thing is handling hundreds of thousands of inserts per second, and it’s even threaded.

  Given that I’ve been programming professionally for over a decade in Python, Perl, Ruby, C, C++, Javascript, Java, and Rust, I’ll pick Rust absolutely any time that I want something running that I won’t get called at 3 AM to fix. It probably took me 5 times as long to write it as if I did it in Go or Python, but I guarantee it’s saved me 10 times as much time I would have otherwise spent triaging, debugging, and running disaster recovery.

  • “Configuring uWSGI for Production Deployment” (2019) by at Peter Sperl and Ben Green from Bloomberg
  • uWSGI’s max-requests and max-worker-lifetime options are intended to reduce the chance of memory leaks affecting production workloads
• [@00:14:47] - Crate of the week: osmpbf

  A Rust library for reading the OpenStreetMap PBF file format (*.osm.pbf). It strives to offer the best performance using parallelization and lazy-decoding with a simple interface while also exposing iterators for items of every level in a PBF file.

  • OpenStreetMap
  • Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT OSM)

[@00:16:40] Official Notices

• [@00:16:43] - Rust Compiler June 2022 Steering Cycle

[@00:21:24] Highlights

• [@00:21:51] (async) Rust doesn’t have to be hard
  • Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming
  • Stack Overflow Developer Survey: Most loved programming language
• [@00:28:28] clippy book
• [@00:29:40] Rolling co-lead roles for T-compiler
• [@00:36:33] Hyper vs Rocket - Low Level vs Batteries included
  • Rust is surprisingly expressive (2013) by Steve Klabnik
• [@00:40:00] Macro Patterns - A match made in heaven by Conrad Ludgate
• [@00:41:11] Web Scraping with Rust by Gints Dreimanis
  • Hyper with Sean McArthur
• [@00:44:09] Trivia About Rust Types: An (Authorized) Transcription of Jon Gjengset’s Twitter Thread by Jimmy Hartzell
• [@00:46:01] Rust language’s explosive popularity comes with challenges by Ed Targett
  • “A proactive approach to more secure code” (2019) by Microsoft Security Response Center
  • Project Zero team at Google
  • [audio] Rust Foundation with Rebecca Rumbul

Credits

Intro Theme: Aerocity

Audio Editing: Tim McNamara

Hosting Infrastructure: Jon Gjengset

Show Notes: Tim McNamara

Hosts: Tim McNamara, Nell Shamrell-Harrington and Allen Wyma.