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October 7, 2024
Rust is rolling off the Volvo assembly line
In my job I get to speak to lots of people about Rust. Some are just starting out, some have barely ever heard of it, and then some people are running Rust silently in production at a very large company in a very serious product.
Our Statime project now provides strong synchronization performance and accurate synchronization error estimates without manual tuning for any specific hardware, because it automatically determines the main uncertainty parameters for a Kalman-based clock servo. This process is described in a scientific paper, soon to be published by the IEEE.
September 30, 2024
Rust interop in practice: speaking Python and Javascript
September 17, 2024
Mix in Rust with C++
This article will help you to slowly introduce some Rust into your C++ project. We'll familiarize ourselves with the tooling and go through some examples.
August 27, 2024
Mix in Rust with Python: PyO3
In this article, we'll dive into combining Rust with Python. Specifically, this post covers calling modules written in Rust from Python scripts.
August 26, 2024
Current zlib-rs performance
Our
zlib-rs
project implements a drop-in replacement for libz.so
, a dynamic library that is widely used to perform gzip (de)compression.July 15, 2024
Mix in C with Rust: A taste of C in your Rust
Can't wait to learn how to call C code from your Rust project after reading my previous posts about Rust interop in general and calling Rust from C? Good! If you haven't read those yet, please do, because I'm going to assume you have in this article. We've seen the basics of Rust's FFI, and have experimented with calling Rust from C. Going the other way around, you'll walk into much the same challenges.
The other day I came across Diplomat, an opinionated tool that makes a lot of choices for you. If you've read my previous post in this series, you'll have seen that that can be quite valuable. If you haven't read the previous article yet, do so before continuing to read this one, as it'll help you appreciate the concepts in this post, and it introduces the example as well.
July 8, 2024
Statime vs Linux PTP: Comparison of precision
As part of the development of our Precision Time Protocol implementation, Statime, we want to know how it performs compared to other implementations of PTP.
To figure this out, last April we visited VSL, the Dutch National Metrology Institute. There, we performed comparitive precision tests between Statime and Linux PTP.
June 24, 2024
Will Rust be alive in 10 years?
Will Rust still exist, and have proper support, 10, 20 or even 30 years from now? We’ve been asked this question multiple times in the last year. It is a fair question, as adopting any new technology requires an investment and comes with uncertainties, one of them being the durability of the technology. This article explains why we expect Rust to stand the test of time.
June 18, 2024
Want more Rust? Break the cycle!
Let's be frank: Rust is a cool language, but there's not a chance I'm introducing it in my company if I can't get any engineers for it. We'll stick with technologies with a much healthier job market.
June 10, 2024
Tock binary size
Tock is a powerful and secure embedded operating system. While Tock was designed with resource constraints in mind, years of additional features, generalizing to more platforms, and security improvements have brought resource, and in particular, code size bloat.
June 7, 2024
Authentication for PTP
PTP was originally designed for networks in which all devices were ultimately trusted. In version 1, no security mechanism was present, and version 2 only provided an experimental mechanism. However, with version 2.1 of the PTP standard (IEEE 1588-2019) there is now a normative security mechanism in section 16.14.
June 7, 2024
Mix in Rust with C
So, you've just read my previous post on Rust interoperability in general, and now you're curious about how to actually apply the concepts to your situation. You've come to the right place, because in this post and the two that follow, I'll demonstrate how to make Rust and C talk to each other.
June 6, 2024
Mix in Rust
What does it actually mean to introduce Rust in an existing project, and having it communicate with other languages in the code base? This article launches a series of blog posts that provide guidance for introducing Rust into your code base step by step.
May 24, 2024
A safe Internet requires secure time
The internet has a hole at the bottom of its trust stack, and we need to do something about it. In particular, the internet needs secure time synchronization to fortify the security of our digital world. In this article, we present a path towards the adoption of securely synchronized time.
May 14, 2024
Hacking time: how you can control anyone's clock
Messing around with people's clocks can be a great source of practical jokes. Even nowadays, with many people getting their time digitally, this is not as impossible as you might think. (And the month of April, with the switch to summer time and April Fool's Day, provided the perfect timing for this experiment, of course...)
April 15, 2024
Save the planet, code in Rust
The number of data centers worldwide is constantly increasing, and so is their electricity consumption. One way to become more power-efficient is certainly the constant development of better hardware, but we as developers should do our share. This post shows how coding in Rust can help to use existing resources more efficiently, to help preserve our planet — at least a little bit.
March 7, 2024
Sudo-rs dependencies: when less is better
When sudo-rs development started, we added several dependencies using Rust’s crates ecosystem to quickly ramp up development. During development we accrued approximately 135 transitive (direct and indirect) dependencies. Once this was identified, we managed to reduce our total dependencies down to three. In this blog, we explain why and how we did this.
March 1, 2024
“Software must become safer”, but how?
Our tagline reads “Software must become safer”, and for good reason; We feel very strongly about this. But it does lead to the obvious and fair question: “What exactly do you do to ensure that the software your teams produce is safe and secure?”