12 - Jon Gjengset on Rust Internals, Vibe Coding, and Teaching by Streaming

Jon Gjengset is a long-time Rust programmer and educator and the author of Rust for Rustaceans, a book on idiomatic Rust programming for experienced developers.

You can find Jon and his work at https://thesquareplanet.com/

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0:00 Intro 1:00 Vibe coding in Rust: safer or more dangerous? 3:54 Jon's two-week LLM immersion experiment 6:55 When LLMs save time vs. waste it 10:10 Avro IDL transpiler: a perfect LLM task 14:30 Building a Touch Portal plugin with LLM help 16:10 Developing an intuition for LLM delegation 17:18 Unlearning OOP habits in Rust 22:20 Rust's opinionated design and error messages 26:02 Common anti-patterns from newcomers to Rust 28:40 Traits, type classes, and why not OOP 32:47 Unsafe Rust: hygiene, MIRI, and Loom 39:43 Polonius: the next borrow checker 46:31 Rust's narrow standard library — intentional restraint 52:46 Origin of Rust for Rustaceans 57:58 Writing dense, timeless technical prose 1:02:23 Teaching Rust in 10 hours 1:07:32 Rust as a first programming language 1:10:48 Comments as the most important code 1:18:57 Writing comments before the code 1:23:31 Getting unstuck live on stream 1:28:46 Impl Rust vs. Crust of Rust vs. Decrusted 1:30:45 Languages Jon would explore if not Rust 1:32:15 Advice for Scala developers on trying Rust 1:34:10 Recommended books for programmers