RustConf 2025 Interview: Manish Goregaokar, Rust Devtools

At RustConf 2025 in Seattle, the Rust Project Content Team talks with Manish Goregaokar: Clippy co-creator, Servo alum, and around eleven years in the Rust Project, now working on internationalization with ICU4X and interop tooling with Diplomat. Manish shares how contributing to Servo in 2013-2014, when nightly Rust broke every few weeks, pulled him from working with Rust into working on Rust, and how a silly project full of lints became Clippy. Topics include: • Clippy's origins and the culture of mentorship inherited from Servo: writing lints as an accessible on-ramp to compiler internals • How the Rust community changed from one tight-knit group into many overlapping worlds, and why that's healthy • The surprise of 1.0: the flood of Python and JavaScript developers who were always interested in systems programming once the barrier came down • An ontology of interop tooling: unidirectional versus bidirectional tools, and why "other languages calling Rust libraries" was the underserved direction • Diplomat: bridge modules generating a C API, a typed AST, and independently developed backends for C, C++, JavaScript/Wasm, Dart, Kotlin, Java, and Python • ICU4X: internationalization designed from scratch to be modular, embedded-friendly, and pluggable about data, so your app doesn't mispluralize Polish • Restraint about writing crates de novo, nerd-sniping yourself, and designs like ZeroVec and Yoke that others had to convince him to build • jj (Jujutsu): a Rust version control system with changes as first-class concepts distinct from commits Links mentioned: Manish on GitHub: https://github.com/Manishearth Clippy: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-clippy Servo: https://servo.org/ ICU4X: https://github.com/unicode-org/icu4x Diplomat: https://github.com/rust-diplomat/diplomat UniFFI: https://github.com/mozilla/uniffi-rs CXX: https://cxx.rs/ bindgen: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen jj (Jujutsu): https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj Interview conducted on behalf of the Rust Project Content Team.