2013-2015 • core tooling development
i worked on rust for a few years during the critical push toward the 1.0 release. my contributions focused on tooling, documentation, and making rust more accessible and cross-platform.
how i got started
the summer of 2011, i was a rising junior in high school at an MIT summer program. i bumped into Rust somehow—it intrigued me but the github repo was beyond my comprehension. i had grown dissatisfied with C, having finally mastered it and experienced the pains of ensuring ABI stability. i started exploring D, but one fateful day in 2013 Servo/Rust was posted to Slashdot, raising it to my consciousness again.
by then i was well versed in Unix system programming, primarily using Python and C. while learning Rust i started adding missing docs and improving sharp edges in compiler warnings. i was excited by the opportunity to contribute to a new programming language and found the IRC channels to be a breath of fresh air. soon i was patching up unimplemented minutiae and implementing terminfo because my rustc output wasn't pretty.
it happened organically—i noticed many areas to improve while learning and felt free to roll up my sleeves and fix them.
lasting contributions
rustdoc
created the first version of what became the currently-shipped rustdoc. before this, rust's documentation infrastructure was minimal. rustdoc transformed how rust crates document their APIs, establishing rustc interaction patterns that are now fundamental to the rust ecosystem (eg public-api. the tool generates HTML documentation from the fully analyzed source code and has become essential infrastructure that every rust developer uses.
flexible target specification
spec'd and implemented the "flexible target specification" system that rustc uses for cross-compilation. this feature allows rust to target arbitrary platforms by describing their properties in JSON files, rather than hard-coding platform details into the compiler. this work was crucial for rust's portability and made it feasible to compile rust for embedded systems, operating systems, and unusual architectures.
This Week in Rust
started This Week in Rust, the newsletter that has become the primary way the rust community stays informed about language development, ecosystem updates, and community happenings. it continues to this day as one of the most-read rust resources. it was urgently needed by myself when the community was young: i personally read every r/rust, r/programming (mentioning-rust), Hacker News, IRC subchannels, mailing list post, and Slashdot entries to curate issues. these days, it is community-owned.
VisualRust
kicked off VisualRust, bringing rust support to Visual Studio. this was part of making rust accessible to developers on Windows and in enterprise environments. i made this because my friend Arke was a Windows diehard and i wanted to rust-pill him. vosen took this project over from me when it became clear IDE support wasn't what was keeping Arke from using Rust.
other contributions
- rustc maintenance and code review
- standard library stabilization (Mozilla intern, summer 2014)
- gamedev ecosystem development (jamming with bjz on gl-rs)
- renamed
inttoisize(and related integer type cleanup) - maintained a development blog documenting the journey
the experience
working on rust meant being part of a pre-1.0 language where breaking changes happened weekly. the compiler codebase was constantly evolving, written in a language that was itself changing. this created unique challenges: code that compiled one week might not compile the next, and idioms were still being discovered.
the community was small but intensely focused on making rust viable for production use. IRC was the hub of activity, and reviews were thorough but educational. every contribution helped push rust toward the stability and usability it needed for 1.0.
i learned that infrastructure work—documentation, tooling, developer experience—is as important as language features. rustdoc and the target specification system weren't glamorous, but they were essential for rust's adoption. making the language accessible and understandable was just as crucial as making it fast and safe.
technical details
much of my work involved understanding rust's internals deeply: the AST, type system, trait resolution, and LLVM backend. i wrote about these topics on this blog, including posts on type-based alias analysis, the structure of rustc, and various compiler internals.
the target specification work required understanding how rustc interfaces with LLVM, how different platforms differ in their ABIs and calling conventions, and how to make these differences configurable rather than hardcoded. this was systems programming at its most detailed.
Rust in a way was a unifying force in my education, allowing a "narrow focus on Rust" to scatter the rays of learning much farther than i otherwise would have shined them.
disengagement
i eventually got distracted by seL4 in 2015, and redirected my energies towards trying to build Robigalia. eventually i just plain ran out of steam to keep contributing to open source. the stresses of school, starting a career, and a general level of self-neglect catching up with me all contributed to me not getting as much joy from open source, and i stopped to preserve my energies.