Rust, In Sickness & In Health

Rust, In Sickness & In Health Bryan Cantrill Oxide Computer
Company

2017: Getting out of a bad relationship… Platform as a
Reﬂection of Values, Node Summit 2017 OXIDE

2018: The Summer of Rust The Summer of Rust, Systems
We Run, 2018 OXIDE

2018: Falling in love Falling in Love with Rust OXIDE

2018: Lots to love! • Rust’s error handling is beautiful
• I love tuples • The macros are incredible • The integrated testing is terriﬁc • format! is a pleasure • The community is amazing • include_str! is a godsend • The performance rips • Serde is stunningly good OXIDE

2018: Dreaming of the future • In 2018, I knew
two things: I wanted to one day start a company with Steve Tuck – and whatever we did would be in Rust • Importantly: we did not (yet!) know what we would do! • …but the values of Rust – robustness, performance, expressiveness – clearly resonated with the software that I wanted to build • It is not an exaggeration to say that we needed a problem beﬁtting the language – and the technologists that the language attracted… OXIDE

2018: A problem beﬁtting the language Original Oxide pitch deck,
2019 OXIDE

2018: Rewrite the operating system in Rust? Is It Time
to Rewrite the Operating System in Rust?, QConSF 2018 OXIDE

2019: A name? OXIDE

2019: A name?? OXIDE

2019: A name?! OXIDE

2019: A name! OXIDE

2019: Wedding bells! The soul of a new computer company
OXIDE

2019: The attraction of Rust • Our Rust use was
not by fiat – but we also wanted to be sure that Rust was thoroughly disqualified before using a different language at any layer • This disposition served as a cultural beacon, attracting like minds • Attracting technologists with a disposition towards Rust greatly strengthened that disposition – become a positive feedback loop • We quickly discovered that it was more versatile than we imagined – and Rust itself became the lens by which we made technology decisions OXIDE

2020: Learning to live together • For myriad reasons (viz.
RFD 26 Host Operating System & Hypervisor), we wanted a host operating system that was illumos-derived • This necessitated illumos Tier 2 support for Rust, which was… painful • Technically, this was straightforward – the challenge was getting ﬁxes into the crate ecosystem upon which Rust tooling (e.g., rustup) depends • But it was also revealing: the Rust community was much more hospitable to alternative operating systems than other communities we’ve been in! OXIDE

2020: Honeymoon Dave Pacheco and Adam Leventhal, Contract as Code
as Contract, ASC 2020 OXIDE

2020: Extended honeymoon Cliﬀ Biﬄe, On Hubris and Humility, Open
Source Firmware Conference 2021 OXIDE

2020: After the honeymoon Rust after the honeymoon OXIDE

2020: After the honeymoon • no_std • paste! • {:#x?}
• unsafe • Integer literal syntax • Multi-platform support • DWARF support • anyhow! + RUST_BACKTRACE • Gimli and Goblin • asm! • Data-bearing enums • String continuations • Ternary operations • --pretty=expanded and cargo expand OXIDE

2021: Nest building Ben Naecker and Adam Leventhal, USDT Past,
Present, and Future, dtrace.conf(24) OXIDE

2023: Bearing fruit! OXIDE

2023: The brood • Embedded OS (Hubris) • REST framework
(Dropshot) • Embedded debugger (Humility) • OpenAPI client gen (Progenitor) • Bootloader (phbl) • Storage service (Crucible) • In-kernel packet engine (OPTE) • Switch OS (Dendrite) • Hypervisor (Propolis) • Routing stack (Maghemite) • Control plane (Omicron) • P4 Compiler (x4c) OXIDE

2024: Marital tribulations Rain Paharia, Cancelling async Rust, RustConf 2025
OXIDE (See also RFD 397 and RFD 400)

2024: Reminding ourselves why we fell in love Adam Leventhal,
Uniting Rust Servers and Clients through OpenAPI, Nordic APIs 2024 OXIDE

2025: A brief sickness Dave Pacheco and Eliza Weisman, When
Async Attacks!, Oxide and Friends, 2025 OXIDE

2025: Renewing vows Dave Pacheco, Update on Update, OxCon 2025
(See also RFD 532, RFD 619) OXIDE

2025: A mysterious illness Sean Klein, Futurelock And You, TokioConf
2026 OXIDE (See also RFD 609)

2025: A mysterious illness Sean Klein, Futurelock And You (TokioConf
2026) OXIDE (See also RFD 609)

2026: Second honeymoon? Will Chandler demonstrating Hansei, Oxide Demo Friday,
2026 OXIDE

In sickness and in health • Broadly, Rust has been
very good for Oxide: not only as an artifact and as a community – but as a reﬂection and projection of values • The grand Rust bargain – the shift of cognitive load from production to development – has been emphatically and unequivocally the right one • Async cancellation was a point of despair exactly because Rust has generally saved us from problems that require non-local reasoning! • Our most vexing technical challenges with Rust rhyme with one another: they stem from emergent complexity in production OXIDE

Growing old together • It is very important to us
that – above all else! – Rust not screw it up • We worry where Rust’s grand bargain may be undermined – and putative reduction in developer load exchanged for emergent production behavior • Debuggability – especially postmortem – can hold this in check (revisiting Kernighan's Law: if we can’t debug it, we shouldn’t write it!) • We are grateful for Rust and its community – they have allowed us to become who we are, attracting kindred spirits and like minds • We very much look forward to growing old together! OXIDE

Rust, In Sickness & In Health

Rust, In Sickness & In Health

Bryan Cantrill

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