76: From C to Rust on Mobile

In this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, Pascal interviews Elaine and Buping about their work on rewriting a core messaging library at Meta in Rust. They discuss the challenges of working with a large, legacy C code base, including memory management issues and the complexities introduced by Meta's open culture. They delve into the reasons for choosing Rust, the state of Rust on mobile, and the developer experience of switching over, including the importance of mentorship and community support. They also touch on the challenges they faced during the migration, such as working with proc macros and BindGen, and how they measure the success of their incremental rewrite.