10 Years of Betting on Rust

Summary

10 years of betting on Rust and what I’m looking forward to next.By Alec Mocatta, Founder1 Jun, 2025I wrote my first line of Rust in June 2015, a month after the buzz of Rust 1.0 landing. Coming from C, Python, and JavaScript, I never looked back. Two Rust-based startups and 500k lines of Rust later, here are some reflections on the milestone.The early days were painfulVersion compatibility was poor—both between crates and with the compiler itself. A bug-fix update could force a compiler bump, which in turn dragged in unstable crates like syntex (once a key serde dependency) and their dependents. In practice we “updated the world” and temporally pinned when a critical bug fix or feature demanded it—early on this was as often as every 6-week compiler release cycle. An awful lot of time was wasted binary-searching for compatible version combinations.“Fighting the borrow checker” was real for me. Traits came naturally given background in C++, Java and Objective-C, but lifetimes and the idea of “proofs” that (*mostly) don’t affect codegen took a while to grok. Patient friends and colleagues made this easier!After a couple years of our codebase and team growing, compile times became painful. Large types were a recurring issue (and still are, occasionally), requiring diagnosis and mitigation. Investments brought it down for us, but iteration cycles still took a hit and rapid prototyping generally required effort to set up.The people were and are exceptionalThe Rust ecosystem has an impressive amount of programming “taste”, manifesting in dependencies with relatively simple builds, elegant implementations, and fast and robust performance. Reaching for TypeScript or Python is a relative exercise in frustration. There’s a reason Rust has taken the “most loved/admired language” title for nine years now!“What went right” is an essay in itself, but the evolving cadre of dedicated, opinionated and earnest volunteers, with strong mores around saying “no” and “not yet”, are I thin...