Wookash Podcast Alice Ryhl | What About Rust?
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Aug 9, 2025 Alice Ryhl, a Rust language expert and maintainer of the Tokio library from Google, dives into the intricacies of Rust. She discusses her journey from learning Rust in high school to becoming a contributor, emphasizing its unique memory management and safety features. The conversation includes asynchronous programming in Rust, integration with the Linux kernel, and the promising future of in-place initialization. Alice also touches on Rust's strengths in low-level programming while highlighting challenges in game development.
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Design For The Compiler, Then Iterate
- Write code in the right direction and iterate using the compile loop: compile, read errors, then fix them.
- Design APIs and structures to be close to what the compiler accepts to reduce friction and rework.
Async/Await Is Cheap Concurrency, Not Automatic
- Async/await makes spawning many tasks cheap but does not automatically run awaits in parallel.
- Task switching only happens at await points, so long non-await code will not yield control.
Don't Use Async For File IO (Yet)
- Don't rely on Tokio async for heavy file I/O today because OS file APIs are limited and Tokio uses blocking thread pools.
- Prefer synchronous file APIs or wait for io_uring support before moving large file workloads to async.