Falling in love with Rust

bcantrill.dtrace.org

Let me preface this with an apology: this is a technology love story, and as such, it’s long, rambling, sentimental and personal. Also befitting a love story, it has a When Harry Met Sally feel to it, in that its origins are inauspicious… First encounters Over a decade ago, I worked on a technology to which a competitor paid the highest possible compliment: they tried to implement their own knockoff. Because this was done in the open (and because it is uniquely mesmerizing to watch one’s own work mimicked), I spent way too much time following their mailing list and tracking their progress (and yes, taking an especially shameful delight in their occasional feuds). On their team, there was one technologist who was clearly exceptionally capable – and I confess to being relieved when he chose to leave the team relatively early in the project’s life. This was all in 2005; for years for me, Rust was “that thing that Graydon disappeared to go work on.” From the description as I read it at the time, Graydon’s new project seemed outrageously ambitious – and I assumed that little would ever come of it, though certainly not for lack of ability or effort…