Struct show_notes::interview::rbr_2017::jess_saxeter::Transcript

pub struct Transcript;

Jess Saxeter

Chris: Hello! Can you tell us your name, and where you work or where you’re from?

Jess: Hi, my name is Jess Saxeter. I am from Dayton, Ohio. I work at a subcontractor out there.

Chris: Sweet. How did you get into Rust?

Jess: I do not remember when I initially started. I stumbled across it – I don’t remember how - but it was back in the Rust 0.9 days. I remember hoping, hoping, hoping that it being 0.9 meant that there was going to be a 1.0 release shortly. It turned out to be not that far wrong, but…!

Chris: How many releases after 0.9, or how many months after that, was it – do you remember?

Jess: I do not remember. It was at least a year.

Chris: Okay. So quite awhile. You’ve been around for quite awhile, then. What do you use Rust for right now?

Jess: I actually do not use Rust in my day job; I do, however, have a hobby project of adapting the Servo (?) browser engine into a UI toolkit that is just now getting to where it might actually be compiling, if not actually doing anything, but it’s compiling!

Chris: Compiling is a good step! What inspired you to do that? That seems like an awesome but a pretty big lift.

Jess: What inspired me to do that is well, my day job, I write really boring line of business apps for the military, and these really boring line of business apps need really useful UI libraries in order to be able to work. If I was ever going to try to use Rust for my day job - which, it’s not going to happen in this particular day job - I would really need a good UI library, something on the order of, like, Winforms (?). Winforms is the library we use. Winforms or Zamil or something like that, and honestly the idea of marrying HTML, CSS, and Rust, just getting rid of the entirety of JavaScript and only using Rust, I find very compelling.

Chris: Sweet. What kinds of things have been good, and maybe what kinds of things have been bad in your experience of using Rust?

Jess: Good things - I like how strongly typed it is. I particularly like the ability to say “Give me that variable and you can’t use it ever again” in an API. It seems like the - it’s overall built to say exactly what you mean to say and have the compiler understand exactly what you mean to say - that I’ve been wanting and wanting these sort of things in my day job, in that C # does not have any notion of ownership at all - everything is aliased, and I wish it wasn’t. For things that I have run into so far, not much, but I also haven’t actually gotten anything compiling yet, so…

Chris: Fair enough. Thanks so much for your time, Jess, it’s been nice chatting with you!

Jess: It’s been nice chatting with you; thank you!