Pitching Rust to decision-makers - with Joel Marcey

Joel Marcey, Director of Technology at the Rust Foundation, and Marco Otte-Witte, Founder of Mainmatter, discuss the benefits and disadvantages of Rust and how to pitch it to decision-makers. Joel also talks about the Rust Foundation’s goals and his role within it. He goes on to share success stories from companies such as 1password, KDAB, Tweede golf, and Meta.

Marco and Joel then review Rust’s benefits, including safety, efficiency, and security, and highlight its stability and reliability improvements that allow developers to catch whole classes of errors at build time instead of runtime. Joel also mentions the productivity and maintainability gains that people typically see when switching to Rust and Marco points out how the more dynamic, untyped languages, that are typically used in web development, all go back to types for that exact reason.

Finally, the conversation shifts to the topic of pitching Rust adoption to decision-makers. Joel explains that Rust is now typically already in the conversation whenever a language is chosen and that it’s always crucial to be upfront about the disadvantages of Rust, like the steep learning curve, and to make clear what use cases it is not suitable for, like frontend web development. Lastly, Joel highlights the importance of focusing on Rust’s stability, security, and significant operational cost reduction due to its efficiency, when pitching.