Benno Lossin Interview, Rust For Linux Core Team [Rust Project Content @ Kangrejos 2025]

Description

Benno Lossin discusses his work developing a field projection feature for Rust with Tyler Mandry. Field projections allow you to take a generic pointer to a struct and turn it into an equivalent pointer to one of the struct's fields. Many pointer types can support this pattern, including raw pointers, ArcᐸTᐳ, &CellᐸTᐳ, std::cell::RefᐸTᐳ, &mut MaybeUninitᐸTᐳ, and pinned references. Support for custom pointer types is planned, with applications including aliasing references for C++ interop and for Linux's RCU (read-copy-update) synchronization mechanism. We dive into these use cases, design challenges, syntax questions, and talk about the process of developing a language feature. Benno is a member of the Rust for Linux core team, and Tyler is co-lead of the Rust Language design team. Benno Lossin: https://github.com/BennoLossin Follow @rustvideos for our upcoming video interviews! Interviewer: Tyler Mandry (https://github.com/tmandry) (note that Canadian Aboriginal syllabics are used instead of angled brackets in the above code as these are not allowed in a YouTube description: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics)