Show Notes
What does it take to rewrite the foundational components of one of the world's most popular Linux distributions? Ubuntu serves over 12 million daily desktop users alone, and the systems that power it, from sudo to core utilities, have been running for decades with what Jon Seager, VP of Engineering for Ubuntu at Canonical, calls "shaky underpinnings."
In this episode, we talk to Jon about the bold decision to "oxidize" Ubuntu's foundation. We explore why they're rewriting critical components like sudo in Rust, how they're managing the immense risk of changing software that millions depend on daily, and what it means to modernize a 20-year-old operating system without breaking the internet.
More from Rust in Production
Welcome to the final episode of this season of Rust in Production. My guest is Orhun Parmaksız from JetBrains, and we talk about building developer tools with Rust.
Most Rust developers use the language, compiler, package registry, and tooling every day without thinking too much about the organization that helps keep parts of that ecosystem funded and sustainable. This episode is a re-introduction to the Rust Foundation: what it does, what it does not do, how it relates to the Rust Project, and why that distinction matters for teams using Rust professionally.
Most Rust in Production stories are about scale and performance. This one is a story about low-cost phones and patchy mobile connections in Africa, where a student is learning maths over WhatsApp. The whole point is to support hundreds of thousands of students cheaply enough to run at government scale.
There's a particular kind of pressure that comes with maintaining software at the very bottom of someone else's stack. ClickHouse lives in exactly that spot: roughly 1.5 million lines of mostly C++ and tens of millions of tests every single day.
I don't know about you, but to me there are few things as interesting as the hardware/software interface: the point where carefully written code meets the messy, physical world of sensors, lenses, and real-time constraints. It's where a clever abstraction either holds up or falls apart the moment a real signal hits it.