The Rust Foundation with Lori Lorusso and David Wood

So it was commented that that that Russ was started by Mozilla 12 to 13 years ago.

Is there like an interesting story? And I'm curious if maybe Lori might know a little bit more about this of like, why, like, why? what was the initial impetus at Rust and like, when did it start to grow outside of Mozilla? Because I mean, today Rust really is kind of a, I think there's a dash RS version of every package created in the last 20 years.

So it's, it's gaining popularity and I'm curious like how it escaped the lab there at Mozilla.

Yeah.

I mean, Mozilla started Rust for Firefox.

They, There were parts of their browser that they wanted to paralyze, and they tried to do it in their C++ codebase and couldn't.

They just found that they kept running into memory safety errors whenever they tried to rebuild this part of their system.

And so they thought, and obviously, you know, as a browser, it's a big attack surface.

It's probably one of the more complicated bits of software that any of us have on our computers.

So they really wanted to make that secure.

They do a lot of work in that regard.

Rust was sort of a research endeavor of theirs, trying to make a language that would... give them some of those properties.

And people saw the promise and it became slightly larger over time and they started to use all over the place.

And then I think that's where the foundation starts picking up when it hit that kind of threshold.

Yeah.

And so I know this isn't like the gross out moment, but with a lot of projects, sometimes there are inner workings that don't necessarily work out.

And so the foundation was kind of sprung up from that sort of issue.

And so we've been around for five years and we have been stewarding the project since then, which has been great.

And I think, you know, I came to Rust when I worked for a different company, when memory safety became a The thing, right? People love Rust as a language, but all of a sudden security now became an issue and everyone was talking about like the executive order about, you know, things moving forward had to be written in a memory safe language.

So to David's point about all the different ways that you might be interacting with Rust and not know about it, you know, the interoperability of Rust is huge.

huge you know taking your legacy code and modernizing it with rust has been great and so the foundation is here to bring more awareness into all of the different avenues that people might not know about rust like you might come for the memory safety and you stay for the compiler you stay for all of these other reasons and like there's so many things that you can do without having to rewrite with just having to wrap and and build on top of so that's kind of where we're at it's like Rust has been listed as the most loved language.

How do we make it into the most adopted language? How do we take it one step forward? You know, we've got the Safety Critical Rust Consortium, which is working with all kinds of organizations to just do that.

Right.

To make sure we hit a certain standard where you can have rust operate in airplanes and cars and other industries.

vehicles and things like that where safety is critical.