RustConf 2025 Interview: Tyler Mandry, Rust Language Team Lead, Rust Project

At RustConf 2025 in Seattle, the Rust Project Content Team talks with Tyler Mandry, co-lead of the Rust Language Team, about how the lang team works, project goals, interop and Crubit, and a tiling window manager written in Rust. Tyler shares how a skeptic of "starry-eyed people at Mozilla" spent two weeks hunting a race condition in a senior engineer's C++, read the early Rust blog posts, and decided to invest his career in Rust: implementing generic associated types in Chalk, optimizing coroutines, and joining the lang team. Topics include: • What a lang team co-lead actually does: an open weekly triage meeting and a weekly design meeting, all on the Rust Zulip • Project goals as an entry point: propose the work you want to commit to, get team support, and go, like the field projection and reborrowing goals • How RFCs succeed today: start with a motivating vision, then experiment in the compiler before writing everything down • One-way and two-way doors, preserving optionality, and why nobody has to be the person in the basement with a cork board and a million strings • Status-quo bias and learned helplessness: why Tyler thinks people are too scared to change Rust, and why small deltas should still add up to a cohesive vision • Interop as what lets Rust take over the world: CXX today, Crubit's third wave of more integrated Rust-C++ interop tomorrow • Glide: his third attempt at a macOS tiling window manager (after Lua and Swift), built on objc2 and an actor architecture • Where Rust isn't the best fit: shell scripts, front ends, and knowing when to take the better-lit path Tyler's RustConf 2025 talk with Taylor Cramer on Rust-C++ interop and Crubit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5M4NIWoMJQ Links mentioned: Tyler on GitHub: https://github.com/tmandry Rust Language Team: https://lang-team.rust-lang.org/ The Rust Zulip: https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/ Rust Project Goals: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/ Crubit: https://github.com/google/crubit CXX: https://cxx.rs/ Glide, a tiling window manager for macOS: https://github.com/glide-wm/glide AeroSpace: https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace objc2: https://github.com/madsmtm/objc2 Interview conducted by Pete LeVasseur on behalf of the Rust Project Content Team.