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**Cliff Biffle:** I actually feel like one of the ways people sometimes have a hard time starting here is if they treat it too much like that. So it's not like you need to write a thousand paragraphs in English before you can write a line of code. A lot of things here start as a prototype. But then if you want to build... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Jerod Santo:** So when you were writing on your blog, this was about Rust, right? |
**Cliff Biffle:** Lately, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** But back then, when they founded it... |
**Cliff Biffle:** Since like 2015. It's been mostly Rust. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So how'd you find Rust and why'd you like it? |
**Cliff Biffle:** So I was working in firmware at Google, doing high-altitude balloon tracking and communication stuff, and we were using C. And I've been using C since I was a kid, because my dad just flew up in it. But it's really hard to produce correct software that doesn't contain bugs, particularly on a team with... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[08:16\] This is 2019 you said? |
**Cliff Biffle:** This would have been 2015, originally. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** 2015, okay. |
**Jerod Santo:** Way back. So you said "recently", but that was a decade ago... |
**Cliff Biffle:** Yeah. I'm old. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. I just wanted to point that out. \[laughs\] Alright, so you're writing Rust blogs, so you're writing Rust... Here comes Oxide, you start working on Oxide, you're writing more Rust... |
**Cliff Biffle:** Yeah. I think Oxide was an interesting opportunity, because I don't super-care about our product. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Ooh. Tell me more. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Cliff Biffle:** Like, I care that it's good. I want to make a good product. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. |
**Cliff Biffle:** But I'm never going to buy one of these. You're probably not ever going to buy one of these. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I can aspire to buy one... |
**Cliff Biffle:** Yeah, you can aspire to buy one. |
**Jerod Santo:** We'll pitch a home lab version. We can set that aside for now. |
**Cliff Biffle:** Yeah, now we're talking... But it's like a fancy McLaren sports car, or like a Ferrari. I'm probably never going to buy one. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Cliff Biffle:** So this product isn't for me. So I had to find other ways to really get motivated around it, and the main things are this is a team that really wants to try to do things right from the ground up, which I can get behind. That sounds like a hell of a challenge. The team is amazing. My co-workers are ama... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We will. |
**Cliff Biffle:** Good. So you have to look for all the other ways to do this. And sort of the "How do you build an engineering org from a team that fits around a small restaurant table, to this size, and be able to bring in people that don't have relevant experience, and be able to bring in people that maybe had a car... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** In the firmware world, is it written in Rust, or is it written in C? |
**Cliff Biffle:** Our stuff's all Rust. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** All Rust. So there's no -- there's one thing in C, right? Wasn't it like some operating system you had that's not Hubris, that still is C? |
**Cliff Biffle:** Yeah. Helios is our sort of version of the Illumos operating system, which is descended from SunOS Solaris. That's mostly C. It's also older, pretty well-tested C. It's not new, potentially buggy C, so we think it's a lower risk. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Does it change much? |
**Cliff Biffle:** It doesn't change that much, although we've obviously had to extend it a bunch. But we've been doing a lot of the extending and changing in Rust. But other than that, all the stuff on top of that, all the stuff below that is all Rust. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a good thing. |
**Cliff Biffle:** Yeah, we think it's good. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I was talking to somebody that said if they had to not write Rust here... Like let's say Go, for example. |
**Cliff Biffle:** Alright... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They were like "Nah, nah... Can't do that." How do you feel about that? |
**Cliff Biffle:** I don't love Go specifically, but there's other languages that -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Nothing goes bad, but like compared to Rust for some of the things you solve... |
**Cliff Biffle:** Not for what I'm doing. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...Go's not in the picture there. |
**Cliff Biffle:** No, it's not. I mean, there really aren't a lot of options on the systems I work on, which are like the 50 cent microcontroller that's inside of your credit card. There's just not a lot of resources. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I never thought about that. A computer in my pocket. What makes Rust uniquely -- |
**Cliff Biffle:** There's probably a bunch of computers in your pocket right now, actually. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** At least four. What makes Rust uniquely positioned for firmware? |
**Cliff Biffle:** So Rust -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Or your lower-level things. |
**Cliff Biffle:** The thing that Rust took from C and the C family is like - the C family gives you really fine-grained control over what the computer's resources are being used for at any given time. So you have tight control over how much memory is being used. You have tight control over whether memory is used at all... |
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