Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl

Description

Rust is one of the most admired programming languages around – and also one of the hardest to learn. What makes developers stick with it? In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast, I sit down with Alice Ryhl, a software engineer on Google’s Android Rust team, and a core maintainer of Tokio, which is the most widely-used async runtime in Rust. We discuss what makes Rust different from other languages like TypeScript, Go, and C++, and why so many developers say that “once it compiles, it works.” We go deep into memory safety, ownership, borrowing, unsafe Rust, and Cargo. We also cover how Rust is governed by RFCs, feature flags, its six-week release cycle, how engineers get paid to work on the language, and also look into how Rust’s use inside the Linux kernel is progressing. — *Brought to you by our season partners:* • Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages. https://antithesis.com/pragmatic • Sentry – application monitoring software considered “not bad” by millions of developers https://sentry.io/pragmatic • Craft Conference: join Gergely, Kent Beck, Hillel Wayne and others at the conference dedicated to the art and science of software delivery craft. https://craft-conf.com/2026 — *The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:* • The past and future of modern backend practices https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-past-and-future-of-backend-practices • How Kotlin was built with Andrey Breslav https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-programming-language-after-kotlin • How Swift was built with Chris Lattner https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/from-swift-to-mojo-and-high-performance • How Linux is built with Greg KH https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-linux-is-built-with-greg-kroah — *Where to find Alice Ryhl:* • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceryhl • Website: https://ryhl.io — *In this episode, we cover:* (00:00) Intro (04:09) Tokio: an overview (05:11) What Alice likes about Rust (12:48) Rust for TypeScript engineers (13:51) Moving from C++ to Rust (14:34) Memory safety (18:12) Garbage collection tradeoffs (21:46) Ownership, references, and borrowing (26:59) Unsafe in Rust (31:21) Crates and Cargo (35:55) Language design and RFCs (43:02) Building new features (46:30) Editions vs. versions (49:47) Getting paid to work on Rust (51:27) Contributing to Rust (53:03) Rust in the Linux kernel (55:45) AI use cases for Rust (1:01:35) Learning Rust (1:03:54) Book recommendation — See the transcript and other references from the episode at https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/.