kerkour.com
Use monorepos My very unscientific analysis of the Rust ecosytem has come to the conclusion that Rust developers are wasting way too much time managing packages and dependencies. Whoever has used crates from the RustCrypto project knows wha...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-05-27
~1 min read
kerkour.com
As a Rust project grows in size, it can take a non-trivial amount of efforts to keep it in a clean state that will not impede your and your co-workers' and agents' productivity due to Rust's package management and module system that is bett...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-05-20
~8 min read
kerkour.com
"Is Rust a good fit for this project?" I get this question quite frequently so I think it's time to write down my thoughts if it can help to avoid some painful and costly mistakes. Short answer: probably not (unless your team is already ful...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-05-13
~9 min read
kerkour.com
The cheapest way to learn is to learn from others, so I always take a day every week to see what other organizations are doing and how they are doing it. As Rust is slowly but surely replacing C / C++ for embedded development, operating sys...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-05-06
~8 min read
kerkour.com
Turso, Neon, Polars, Databend, Materialize, DataFusion, InfluxDB, Quickwit and many more. Outside of DuckDB, PostgreSQL's core and ClickHouse, most of, if not all, the most impactful projects in the database world are now written in Rust. W...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-04-29
~5 min read
kerkour.com
There recently has been a lot of noise about quantum computing breakthroughs after Google's articles Quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear and Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly, followe...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-04-22
~9 min read
kerkour.com
Supply chain attacks are all the rage these days with many high-profile attacks that were carried out against the Python ecosystem (with litellm), JavaScript (with axios) and WordPress in the last month alone. These attacks will inevitably...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-04-15
~6 min read
kerkour.com
An essential part of being able to say "I told you so" is in fact having told you so. Well, here we are. For those living under a rock (lucky you), multiple very popular software packages have been compromised over the past few week, such a...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-04-08
~13 min read
kerkour.com
Over the decades, Humans have proved to be pretty bad at producing bug-free software. Trying to apply our approximative, fuzzy thoughts to perfectly logical computers seems doomed. While the practice of code reviews is increasing, especiall...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-04-01
~6 min read
kerkour.com
Growing up with James Bond, Alex Rider and Inspector gadget, I've naturally always been fascinated by gadgets that enable the hero to spy and fight the badies. Fast forward too many years later, these capabilities are not longer reserved to...
Rust Walkthroughs
2026-03-25
~16 min read
kerkour.com
While Docker is now the main way to distribute backend software and CLI tools, you may be wondering how to build minimal and secure Docker images for your Rust projects. Building minimal docker images is not only good for security (reduced...
Rust Walkthroughs
2026-03-18
~6 min read
kerkour.com
Most people see PostgreSQL as a simple database, like MariaDB or CLickHouse, while it has in fact evolved into a "data kernel", managing how data is stored and queried, in the same way that Linux is a "computing kernel", managing processes...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-03-11
~5 min read
kerkour.com
I love boring, simple, polyvalent and reliable tools. Tools that can take time to master, but then feel like superpowers. In the software world, the two best are without a doubt Rust and PostgreSQL. One recent example: a backend service I'm...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-03-04
~6 min read
kerkour.com
Some time ago, we saw that SHA-2 (SHA-256 & SHA-512) should probably be your function of choice for 2030 and beyond, because SHA-3 is too slow and BLAKE3 is (unfortunately) not NIST-compliant. As explained, SHA-256 is preimage resistant: it...
Rust Walkthroughs
2026-02-25
~15 min read
kerkour.com
A lot of reasonable people may perceive my enthusiasm for Rust as misguided fanaticism, but it isn't. It's cold pragmatism. Sherlock Holmes liked to say "When you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-02-18
~8 min read
kerkour.com
While a lot of energy is spent on design patterns and low-level tricks such as SIMD acceleration, very few resources are available about actually delivering Rust software to your users: workflows, security hardening and artifacts management...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-02-11
~5 min read
kerkour.com
I love Rust and I love SQLite, so you can imagine that I was pretty excited when I learned that "SQLite was being rewritten in Rust": Turso. SQLite is probably the most deployed database in the world, with dozens of databases on any of your...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-01-28
~6 min read
kerkour.com
While combinators are a great way to make your code more functional and declarative, Rust has something even better in its sleeve: async combinators. You may be wondering: what combinators have to do with async? Well, the Future and the Str...
Rust Walkthroughs
2026-01-21
~4 min read
kerkour.com
37.2% of vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries are memory safety issues, while only 27.2% are cryptographic issues, according to an empirical Study of Vulnerabilities in Cryptographic Libraries (Jenny Blessing, Michael A. Specter, Dani...
Observations/Thoughts
2026-01-14
~5 min read
kerkour.com
I've recently tasted AMD Zen 5 CPUs (AWS' m8a instances) and... Whooaaa. Even before talking about GPUs and NPUs, the next 5 years of CPUs will be very exciting! On a m8a.2xlarge virtual instance, pure-Rust ChaCha20 runs at 5.1 GB / s, ChaC...
Rust Walkthroughs
2026-01-07
~11 min read