Rust

The programming language that the cool kids are rewriting everything in

2024-11-01 — 2026-04-10

Wherein the incursion of a compiled systems language into Python tooling is surveyed, and its extension into browsers, editors, CLI utilities, and desktop environments is further noted.

computers are awful

Assumed audience:

Dilletantes who suspect something about rust produces a higher average code quality than other random crap out there

Figure 1

Rust is a programming language designed for performance and safety, particularly safe concurrency. TBH, I know little about it except that proponents claim it makes safety the default and reduces certain classes of bugs common in C and C++. The fact that the language itself is “easy-ish” — but not quite as easy as Python or JavaScript — seems deliberate. If something’s rewritten in Rust, that’s a weak indicator that someone cared enough to do it properly. YMMV

The canonical hype signal: someone posts a benchmark showing their Rust rewrite is 10–100× faster than the Python original, data scientists retweet it, and six months later the Python version quietly vendors the Rust binary.

1 Python tooling

The most visible Rust incursion into data science is through Python tooling. The pattern: write the hot path in Rust, expose Python bindings, watch adoption explode.

uv — package manager and project tool from Astral. Replaces pip, pip-tools, virtualenv, pyenv, and poetry in one binary. Written in Rust, absurdly fast. The one that actually changed my workflow.

Ruff — Python linter and formatter, also from Astral, also written in Rust. Replaces flake8, isort, pyupgrade, and chunks of pylint. Fast enough that you stop arguing about whether to run it in CI.

Polars — DataFrame library. The pitch is “pandas but written in Rust so it’s fast and the API is sane.” Uses Apache Arrow internally, has lazy evaluation, and handles out-of-core data. Data scientists have been hyping it as the pandas replacement for a few years now; it’s genuinely good.

Pydantic v2 — the popular Python data-validation library rewrote its core (pydantic-core) in Rust. You don’t use Rust directly, but you benefit from it every time a FastAPI endpoint validates a request.

2 Browsers

Firefox uses Rust extensively — Mozilla essentially developed Rust in-house for this purpose. The Servo layout engine was the original proving ground, and Firefox’s CSS engine, media parser, and various security-sensitive components are now Rust. Whether this is a success story for Rust, or a cautionary tale about the limits of heroic rewrites, is left as an exercise.

3 Editors and terminals

Zed — code editor from the authors of Atom. Written in Rust, uses a custom GPU rendering stack (GPUI). Positioned as the serious person’s alternative to VS Code. Fast, with collaborative editing built in.

Helix — modal editor (like Neovim but with different opinions about what the defaults should be). Tree-sitter and LSP built in from the start rather than bolted on via plugins. Written in Rust.

4 CLI tools

A cottage industry of rewriting standard Unix tools in Rust, usually with colour output and sensible defaults:

  • ripgrep (rg) — grep replacement, very fast, respects .gitignore
  • fd — find replacement
  • bat — cat with syntax highlighting and git integration
  • eza — ls replacement (fork of the abandoned exa)
  • delta — git diff viewer with syntax highlighting
  • starship — cross-shell prompt
  • mold — linker, much faster than GNU ld for large C++ projects

5 Desktop environments and OS

COSMIC Desktop Environment — System76’s desktop environment for Pop!_OS, written in Rust. An attempt at a Rust-native Wayland compositor and DE. TBC on whether it achieves escape velocity.

Redox OS — An operating system written in Rust, aiming to be secure and free software. It uses a microkernel architecture and is inspired by Unix principles.

6 Web and apps

Tauri — desktop app framework, pitched as an Electron replacement. Uses the OS’s native webview instead of bundling Chromium, so the binaries are small. The backend is Rust. If you want to ship a small desktop app without the 200MB Electron tax, this is the current hipster answer.

Deno — JavaScript/TypeScript runtime (the “Node but better” one from Node’s creator). Core is written in Rust. Deno 2 leaned into Node compatibility, which rather undermined the purity of the project but made it more useful.

SWC — JavaScript/TypeScript compiler used by Next.js and others. Fast. Written in Rust by a then-undergraduate, which is the kind of origin story that makes people feel bad about their own productivity.