Felix: I am a Research Engineer. So at Mozilla that basically means there is a small team dedicated to trying to investigate the future of the internet, and the infrastructure underlying it. So while the vast majority of the engineers at Mozilla are dedicated to the actual product of Firefox, the research group is more interested in what’s next. Things like what’s after Firefox or what is next for the Internet as a whole because our mission is not just about making a web browser. It is about pushing the world forward by using the Internet and trying to ensure the internet is an open resource for everyone. So my part in that research group is focused on the Rust infrastructure. We are pushing Rust as being a piece of what could be foundational infrastructure for making highly reliable services and high performance services.

Felix: The standard package manager that we are using is called Cargo and there is a corresponding website called crates.io where Cargo and crates.io are very tightly linked. Crate is the Rust terminology for a package or library that you are putting up there, so if you have a crate that you want to distribute and you register it on crates.io then Cargo will know about that crate and anybody can get it from there. There are over 4,000 crates and some 22 million downloads at this time. After adding a dependency on a package in a configuration file, they just hit Build and Cargo does the rest in terms of downloading that crate and also all of its dependencies, building them for the respective target and then linking them in. And, that’s it. Cargo supports updating the crates when new versions are available, and setting some rules on what versions of a crate it should download. Maybe someone does not want to use the latest version but some intermediary one.