The “On the Road” episode has two parts, covering different Rust conferences in May 2024. The first section is from RustNL in Delft, the Netherlands, where James interviews Laura and Jonathan, some of the organizers of the event, on their history with Rust and the struggles and successes of putting on these conferences.

The second section of this episode comes from the Oxidize Conference 2024, held in Berlin Germany - here James interviews Jonathan Pallant about the nostalgia of classic computers, the theory of embedded systems and the up and down aspects of building computers for fun.

The RustNL part was recorded on May 8th, 2024, and the Oxidize part on May 30th, 2024.

For more episodes, show notes and the transcript, visit jamesmunns.com/podcast.

I made an interesting discovery in Rust last weekend while messing with postcard:

enums are the only "plain" data type (I'm aware of) in Rust that you can't build "from scratch". When I say "from scratch", I mean using unsafe methods to manually initialize each field, say in a MaybeUninit, then call assume_init().

There are other "complex" data types, like trait objects, you can't necessarily build from scratch, but these are rarely relevant when serializing and deserializing. Even items on the heap can generally be built "in place" using various unsafe methods.

discuss on /r/rust

ℹ️ These are misc notes and thoughts towards figuring out to handle the diverse transports that postcard-rpc may traverse. As of 2024-05-14, USB is the most robustly supported transport, but we'll want to expand this to support serial transport, and particularly support cases where one side (the client) isn't necessary on a std based OS.

One way to approach this is the traditional-ish OSI or TCP/IP layered model (flavored in my personal opinion):

• application
• postcard-rpc
• postcard
• flow control, error detection, acks - FACED
• framing
• wire control

James talks with Scott Mabin about how he joined the Espressif team and got involved in embedded Rust, the working culture in chip manufacturing companies and preferences about designing and building mechanical keyboards.

This episode was recorded on November 8th, 2023.

Another episode is coming from the archives, originally recorded in May 2022 with Manish Goregaokar as the guest- James and Manish touch on many topics, including: internationalization of languages, zero-copy deserialization in Rust, speedrunning video games and Vaccinate CA.

Originally recorded on 2022-05-09