RustConf 2025 Interview: Nicholas R Smith, Software Engineer

At RustConf 2025 in Seattle, the Rust Project Content Team talks with Nick Smith of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), whose equipment protects and monitors electrical grids serving hundreds of millions of people in over 170 countries. This one runs as a rapid Q&A rather than the usual sit-down format. Nick speaks for himself, not his employer, about what Rust could mean for critical infrastructure built on hundreds of millions of lines of C and C++. Topics include: • Protecting the grid: transmission, distribution, fault indicators, and ten-year product warranties that keep codebases alive for decades • The anxiety of writing C++ for substations as a new graduate, and why Rust felt like a breath of fresh air: relying on the type system to uphold invariants instead of running a mental checklist • Never daring to send a PR to a public C++ repo, but confidently contributing patches to Rust CLI tools • The business case: average Rust reaches high quality faster than average C++, which could shorten review times without lowering the bar • The number one technical blocker: interop with mountains of existing C and C++ • The build environment: CMake, Jenkins, GCC, ARM targets, custom embedded operating systems • What he's excited about: the new trait solver, inherent associated types for cbindgen workflows, and Google's $1M investment in the Rust-C++ interop initiative • The "greenfield fallacy": why advocating for incremental adoption through interop beats betting a whole new product on Rust Links mentioned: Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories: https://selinc.com/ Rust Foundation Rust-C++ Interoperability Initiative: https://rustfoundation.org/interop-initiative/ cbindgen: https://github.com/mozilla/cbindgen Interview conducted by Pete LeVasseur on behalf of the Rust Project Content Team.