Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · 15h

You would be calling `handle` directly though...? Or at least some folks would. I agree with Carl's critique but I couldn't up with a suggestion I liked *more*, and I felt there was definite value in introducing the term "handle".

1 1

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · 17h

New blog post, "Symmetric ACP":

smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/bl...

This post describes **SymmACP** -- a proposed extension to Zed Industries' Agent Client Protocol that lets you author extensions to AI tooling that can be combined orthogonally to one another.

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

lnkd.in

1

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · Jun 6

People need to be able to review but the onboarding costs are much lower. I can understand French surprisingly well but speaking it is much harder.

1 2

Reposted by nikomatsakis

Rep. Zooey Zephyr @zoandbehold.bsky.social · Jun 3

My home of Missoula just voted to establish the pride flag as an official government flag of the city, thereby circumventing the state's asinine pride flag ban. 🏳️‍🌈

Missoula is once again showing how to fight back against policies that seek to erase the LGBTQ community.

340 4K 29K

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · Jun 2

I’ve been experimenting with Claude Code/Cline. Interesting how this changes the calculus for languages. Why pick one language over another if the AI is writing a lot of the code? Reviewability and local reasoning seem paramount. Efficiency and portability matter too. The rest? Meh.

2 9

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 31

How had I never heard of firedbg.sea-ql.org/blog/2023-12...? This cools cool! Is it still actively developed? Anybody tried it?

Introducing FireDBG for Rust | FireDBG - 🔥 Time Travel Visual Debugger for Rust

Debugging programs is hard

firedbg.sea-ql.org

1 4 31

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 27

People always ask me “so is AWS using Rust?” Happy to be part of this article shining some light on how Rust is changing the way services are built in AWS.

Werner @werner.social · May 27

In a new guest post from #AWS Sr. Principal Engineers @nikomatsakis.com and Mark Bowes take us inside Aurora DSQL's development from scaling write operations without two-phase commit, to overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and embracing Rust. www.allthingsdistributed.com/2025/05/just...

Just make it scale: An Aurora DSQL story

AWS Senior Principal Engineers, Niko Matsakis and Marc Bowes, take us inside Aurora DSQL's development: scaling write operations without two-phase commit, overcoming garbage collection hurdles, and em...

www.allthingsdistributed.com

5 18

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 24

Press a key for mathjax to kick in

1

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 24

All my jokes are inside jokes with me, myself, and I.

7

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 24

No, they had no problem at all with the notation. They were very engaged and seemed to follow it completely. They loved finding edge cases to make every statement false (Eg color blindness for “red delicious apples are red”). To be fair I did also give candy for the first answer from any given kid.

1

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 23

Thanks!

1

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 23

Today I’ll be teaching the middle school math classes at my daughter’s school. Wish me luck. Or maybe wish the kids luck! nikomatsakis.github.io/math-is-more...

Math is more than numbers - Nicholas Matsakis

nikomatsakis.github.io

2 1 24

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 22

Hey RustWeek! I talked to someone who had a company at RustWeek that could help with processing the data from the Rust Vision Doc survey. I think I have their name or card but I have a lot names and cards so I was wondering whether that person would see this message and reach out to me =)

1 2 7

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 19

Does anybody else feel that copilot's logo looks like a frog?

4

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 16

My favorite part happened on the way over. Five of us were taking an Uber to the venue and one of them I had never met, so I introduced myself. "We've been working together for 10 years," he said. "I'm Vadim Petrochenkov". As far as I know, it's the first time I ever laid eyes on the guy. Amazing!

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 16

I kinda love how goofy I look in this picture (front row left). What a great party!

Rust Language @rust-lang.org · May 15

Live from the 10 Years of Rust celebration in Utrecht, Netherlands, we are very happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.87.0!

See the blog post and release notes for all the details!

blog.rust-lang.org/2025/05/15/R...

25

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 16

I kinda love how goofy I look in this picture (front row left). What a great party!

Rust Language @rust-lang.org · May 15

Live from the 10 Years of Rust celebration in Utrecht, Netherlands, we are very happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.87.0!

See the blog post and release notes for all the details!

blog.rust-lang.org/2025/05/15/R...

Many happy Rustaceans at the release party.

31

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 15

New blog post in honor of Rust's 10th anniversary: smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/bl...

Rust turns 10 · baby steps

smallcultfollowing.com

4 30

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 14

This movie theater is truly the most inspired choice for a conference venue. #rustweek

3 28

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 11

(Those occasions where it is going off track are not boring, admittedly. More like a slow motion train wreck. "Oh my god, noooooooooooo...that was a 2 line change...what are you doing?!")

1 10

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 11

The thing nobody tells you about vibe coding is that it is kind of boring just watching the LLM slowly walk through things, even on those occasions where it is not going off track. There has to be a way to make this more fun.

5 20

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 9

Because that is what you are doing. Asserting that you know something the compiler doesn’t. Ive talked to a lot of people who find the name unwrap confusing, but also I think the name unwrap makes even legitimate usage feel “odd” (at least it does to me).

3

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 9

I’ve definitely noticed this.

Deb Chachra @debcha.bsky.social · May 9

Among the many excellent reasons for English speakers to learn and use a second language is that there is nothing like being worse at communicating than the average toddler to make you aware of how we implicitly conflate thinking and speaking, even (especially) with non-native English speakers.

11

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 9

I gotta hand it to the Boston @mbta.com. The red line is genuinely fast now. All those closures and repairs paid off.

6

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 9

Random hot take of the day: In the runup to Rust 1.0, I argued (unsuccessfully) that `unwrap` should be renamed to `assert_some` or `assert_ok`. I still think I was correct. 😠

4 1 42

nikomatsakis @nikomatsakis.com · May 4

Looking through old photos and I found this one of a whiteboard in Mozilla offices from Nov 2011. IIRC I was explaining early borrow checker designs to @dherman.dev and @pcwalton.bsky.social.

1 7 84