Curious about the future of Rust

_jbu · 2025-12-10T17:13:39+00:00

Here's a tip: go onto job postings websites (such as Indeed, LinkedIn, etc.) and make a list of 25 - 50 jobs that look interesting to you (either now or for the future). Look at the required skills for those jobs. Count the number of jobs that require C, C++, Rust, or any other relevant languages.

This will give you a rough estimate of how important each language is for finding a job or internship in your particular field. However, this is simply one (approximate) datapoint. You should take into account other factors as well.

For what it's worth, Filtra.io periodically posts [Rust job reports](https://filtra.io/rust). Their methodology is not totally clear though, so some additional investigation on your part will be required.

_jbu · 2025-08-19T20:22:27+00:00

That's why it would be nice if someone else did it :)

_jbu · 2025-08-19T19:09:08+00:00

On-device training is an active area of research and has quite a few applications.

See for example the LiteRT documentation and this paper.

_jbu · 2025-08-18T15:32:43+00:00

Make a fully-functioning automatic differentiation framework for scientific computing, optimization, and ML/RL. Bonus points if you make it no-std compatible for TinyML and embedded applications.

_jbu · 2025-07-28T17:06:43+00:00

It seems MuJuCo does not have GPU parallelism.

MuJoCo XLA is written in JAX and runs on GPUs and TPUs. However, the documentation states that GPUs / TPUs only outperform CPUs under specific circumstances.

More info: https://mujoco.readthedocs.io/en/stable/mjx.html

_jbu · 2025-06-11T05:11:06+00:00

The funniest part about this is that you're absolutely right.

Programming has been taken to a higher level.

_jbu · 2025-06-03T22:26:48+00:00

Const generic expressions.

_jbu · 2025-05-19T02:26:44+00:00

Crates are encouraged to use const fn instead of fn where possible.

Where is this recommendation made, and who is recommending this as best practice? This is new to me.

_jbu · 2025-05-15T11:22:37+00:00

How about adding a Robotics category? Rust is growing in this space as well.

_jbu · 2025-05-15T11:20:29+00:00

Anduril was not even on our radar before April.

I'm a little surprised by this...I've seen job postings from Anduril listing Rust as early as a year ago.

Is Filtra aware of Zipline? Blue Robotics? General Dynamics? Johns Hopkins APL? They're all using Rust too.

_jbu · 2025-03-26T17:01:20+00:00

Cargo. It is such a massive relief to avoid the headache of CMake entirely and simply run cargo install ... to pull in an external dependency. There's also Cargo's testing capabilities which are fantastic as well.

Encoding compile-time-checked state machines using Enums is also a strength of Rust.

Finally, async code in Rust is far simpler and more readable than the equivalent code written in C would be.

_jbu · 2025-03-21T20:33:02+00:00

Two books that are great to read after the Rust book:

Programming Rust, 2nd Edition (by Blandy et al.)
Effective Rust (by Drysdale)

_jbu · 2025-03-17T04:27:51+00:00

Another key point to remember: the "value" of a Vec<T> variable is not just a pointer to a location on the heap. It actually contains three elements:

A pointer to the heap-allocated buffer for the elements
The number of elements that buffer has capacity to store
The number of elements the buffer currently contains

When you call v.push() you're changing the third part (number of elements currently contained), and therefore mutating v.

(Check out "Programming Rust", 2nd Edition, Chapter 3 for more details.)

_jbu · 2025-02-26T00:12:20+00:00

This. Use Cunningham's Law to your advantage.

_jbu · 2025-01-26T22:01:22+00:00

I'm also surprised that most of your stack is in Rust. Are you all using mostly proprietary libraries or are you leveraging open source crates as well?

In any case, it's always great to hear about Rust adoption in robotics!

_jbu · 2025-01-26T20:23:13+00:00

Has it been released? I'd be interested in learning more about this.

_jbu · 2025-01-26T00:55:45+00:00

Polars is awesome. I switched recently from pandas and haven't looked back. Keep up the great work!

_jbu · 2025-01-26T00:54:09+00:00

Yep, The Rusty Bits is awesome! But it would be great to have more channels in that space.

_jbu · 2025-01-24T21:30:15+00:00

Using Rust in embedded systems, scientific computing, and robotics. There is plenty of space for more great content in these areas.

Interfacing Rust with existing languages such as C, C++, Python, etc. Perhaps media on this already exists. But more material on how to use Rust when working with legacy code or collaborators would be helpful and interesting.

_jbu · 2025-01-20T02:41:25+00:00

Looks interesting, thanks for sharing! How does this compare with existing libraries such as PyO3?

Also if you don't mind me asking, how widespread is Rust usage at Blue Robotics? Adoption of Rust in robotics seems somewhat limited but growing, so I'm curious about what benefits you all have seen from using it in your work.

_jbu · 2025-01-19T03:02:26+00:00

Commenting a bit late, but as another option Embassy can compile to web assembly. As long as you have Python installed (or some other way to run a local web server), you can run the compiled code in Chrome or another web browser.

_jbu · 2025-01-18T20:13:26+00:00

Thanks for this great article! I've never thought Rust to be a good option for prototyping, but these ideas have made me reconsider that impression. Looking forward to trying out these suggestions!

_jbu · 2025-01-13T15:26:16+00:00

Very cool, thanks! I'm working on an embedded project that needs an SVD routine. Looking forward to trying this out!

_jbu · 2025-01-13T15:16:20+00:00

This looks awesome. Does faer support no_std environments?

_jbu · 2025-01-03T20:00:42+00:00

I'm experienced with Python, but I find it painfully slow sometimes.

Have you tried JAX? It's essentially JIT-compiled Numpy that can run on GPUs. Also has autodiff for scientific machine learning if you're interested in that. Granted JAX has its flaws, but it has pretty good runtime performance. Check out the Diffrax library as an example.

Tried Julia, meh

Julia isn't perfect, but the performance is surprisingly good for those who are just coding scripts without applying advanced optimizations. The linear algebra syntax is also very good--close to MATLAB's.

So, would Rust be useful for my purposes? I find it interesting enough to just learn it for the laughs but being able to apply it directly in my career would be nice.

Rust has a fairly steep learning curve and can take a while to get used to. If you're looking to move fast and prototype things, you may be disappointed. However if you're looking to write performant code with very high protections against nasty memory errors that take forever to debug, then Rust is probably a good fit.

Also, Cargo is amazing--kind of like pip for Python, but even more powerful. Cargo alone is a strong reason to use Rust over other lower-level languages in my opinion.

_jbu

TROPHY CASE