RustWeek Interview: Teor, Rust Foundation C++ Interop Engineer

in this interview from RustWeek 2026 in Utrecht, Rust Lang Team Lead Tyler Mandry sits down with Teor, a C++ Interop Engineer at the Rust Foundation, to discuss ongoing work on Rust-C++ interoperability. Teor shares experiences from their work on the Tor project, explaining how early experiments with integrating Rust into a legacy C codebase led to a full distributed systems rewrite, and how Rust's safety properties impact real-world privacy and security. They cover current interop projects at the Rust Foundation, including "problem space mapping", an effort to document the exact use cases and challenges developers face when interfacing Rust with foreign languages. They also discuss the "splat" overloading experiment, which explores making function overloading ergonomic for C++ FFI without compromising Rust's trait coherence rules, and share early feedback from an informal interop user study that highlighted common onboarding hurdles like link errors and type mismatches. If you are interested in contributing to the interop efforts, you can join the discussion in the #t-lang/interop stream on the Rust Zulip. Links & Resources: Interop Initiative Main Page: https://rustfoundation.org/interop-initiative/ Latest Initiative Update: https://rustfoundation.org/media/rust-foundation-interop-initiative-update-from-research-to-implementation/ Rust Project Goals (Interop Problem Map): https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2026/interop-problem-map.html Rust Project Goals (Overloading for FFI): https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2026/overloading-for-ffi.html Interop Initiative GitHub Repository: https://github.com/rustfoundation/interop-initiative Detailed Problem Statements: https://github.com/rustfoundation/interop-initiative/tree/main/problem-space