About

Glen De Cauwsemaecker created this Educational track to help you get started with Rust from an absolute beginner all the way until you're an expert in it. He is open to mentor people, lead workshops and more. If you're a team lead that wants to introduce Rust to their team, feel free to talk to him. Glen started with Rust around 2015, when Rust was still unstable and fast moving. Coming from a C++ background in a system programming job the benefits were immediately clear to him. In the meanwhile things have changed a lot and many companies have been starting to adopt Rust in their toolset:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) has used Rust since 2017 for its serverless computing offerings, AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate. With that, Rust has gained further inroads. The company has written the Bottlerocket OS and the AWS Nitro System to deliver its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.
  • Cloudflare develops many of its services, including its public DNS, serverless computing, and packet inspection offerings with Rust.
  • Dropbox rebuilt its backend warehouse, which manages exabytes of storage, with Rust.
  • Google develops parts of Android, such as its Bluetooth module, with Rust. Rust is also used for the crosvm component of Chrome OS and plays an important role in Google's new operating system, Fuchsia.
  • Meta uses Rust to power Meta's web, mobile, and API services, as well as parts of HHVM, the HipHop virtual machine used by the Hack programming language.
  • Microsoft writes components of its Azure platform including a security daemon for its Internet of Things (IoT) service in Rust.
  • Mozilla uses Rust to enhance the Firefox web browser, which contains 15 million lines of code. Mozilla's first two Rust-in-Firefox projects, its MP4 metadata parser and text encoder/decoder, led to overall performance and stability improvements.
  • GitHub's npm, Inc., uses Rust to deliver "upwards of 1.3 billion package downloads per day."
  • Oracle developed a container runtime with Rust to overcome problems with the Go reference implementation.
  • Samsung, via its subsidiary SmartThings, uses Rust in its Hub, which is the firmware backend for its Internet of Things (IoT) service.
  • The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has added Rust to its list of "Safer Languages" as part of its Software Assurance Metrics and Tool Evaluation (SAMATE).

Google also has a nice article about Facts and Debunked Myths about Rust which you can find at https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/06/rust-fact-vs-fiction-5-insights-from-googles-rust-journey-2022.html (2022).

The language and its ecosystem have also very matured. Concepts like Async have also landed and Async runtimes such as Tokio have become stable and can be used without fear. While it was harder to convince companies to jump on the Rust wagon in the past, by now it should be a lot easier to sell. Is it one language to replace them all? Of course not, but neither should it be overlooked. Are you not sure how Rust might benefit your team for one thing or another? Contact Glen and figure it out together.

If you are a bit of a history nerd you might also enjoy:

There's a last section on the end of the Rust learning content. This one contains useful references and sources that you can check as part of your continuous journey as a capable Rust developer.

In case you are a Python or Javascript developer you might find the Appendix V. Python / Javascript developers section useful.

Not convinced yet? Read here what others have to say about Rust: https://brson.github.io/fireflowers/