Hardware Podcasts

The Hardest Kind of Unsafe Rust

Oxide and Friends · 13 Jun 2026 · 1h 28m · Episode 14

What this episode covers

Rain Paharia, an engineer at Oxide Computer Company, joins Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal to discuss the `iddqd` Rust crate, which allows keys to be borrowed from values in maps to avoid duplication. Paharia explains that implementing this efficiently requires 'unsafe Rust,' specifically dealing with the 'hardest kind' where the library must remain sound even when user-provided code behaves pathologically or incorrectly. The conversation details how Paharia used property-based testing, Miri, and LLMs to find and fix bugs related to mutable aliasing and panic safety in the crate. The discussion highlights the rigorous responsibility required when writing unsafe code that interacts with untrusted or buggy safe code.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Oxide Computer Company, Ericsson, Google, MITRE
Products
Omicron, CockroachDB, Bun, Doom, Castle Wolfenstein, Battlefield, DTrace
Tools
Miri
Also
Rain Paharia, Bryan Cantrill, Adam Leventhal, iddqd, John Gallagher, Claude Opus 4.7, GPT 5.5, Zig, Rust, Haskell, C, LLVM, Ben Leonard, ChatGPT, Angela Lee Brinker, Sebastian, Dan Cross, Ixie, Robert Ledru, Donald Sobel, Strange But True, Rustnomicon, POPL, PLDI, Ralph Young, BTreeMap, HashMap, Vec, splitter_mut, iter_mut, org, thread_local, stacked borrows, tree borrows, mid level intermediate representation, MIR, JSON, CFFI, JNI, C++, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, V8, Hubris, Hacker News, Lobsters, Mermaid, Discord, Mastodon, crates.io, UUID, sled, disk, sled inventory, natural key, clone, Unsafe Perform IO

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The summary, chapters and topics are generated from the episode’s audio by this directory, not written by Oxide and Friends. The episode itself belongs to its publisher.