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/

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