Josh Triplett on Building the Build System of his Dreams

We sat down with Josh Triplett, co-lead of the Rust Language team, to chat about his journey into Rust contributorship and what considerations he makes when iterating on a language as widely-used as Rust. We also discuss Josh's ideal build system, as well as what changes he thinks the Rust language and community need to make in order for Rust to stay relevant well into the future.

If you're interested in finding out more about the build system Josh is building, head on over to https://buildit.dev.

The Lang team's decision-making process is documented over at https://lang-team.rust-lang.org/decision_process.html.

Josh's homepage is located at https://joshtriplett.org. You can find him on Twitter @josh_triplett.

You can send us an email at buildingwithrust AT gmail DOT com or find us in the Rustacean Station Discord server.

Timestamps

• 0:40 - Welcome
• 0:52 - Josh's intro
• 1:29 - How Josh is spending his days
• 3:05 - Josh's initial experiences playing with Rust
• 7:14 - How Josh got into contributing to Rust
• 8:42 - Explaining some of Rust's pre-1.0 features
• 11:43 - Why do some features get stabilized and others don't?
• 13:12 - Important language design considerations
• 17:42 - Most memorable moments working on the Lang team
• 23:45 - Difficulties to working on the Lang team
• 25:51 - How do you keep your Rust work sustainable?
• 30:30 - What are the most important things in Rust that need working on?
• 34:12 - Advice for those looking to do more high-impact but less visible work
• 37:21 - Writing code is not the only way to contribute to Rust
• 39:34 - Why build a new build system?
• 50:09 - Long-term changes to the Rust language and community you'd like to see
• 1:05:29 - What fictional world would Josh most like to visit?
• 1:11:58 - Josh's sign-off
• 1:13:15 - Outro