An FFmpeg developer and VLC co-founder share their views on Rust in a Lex Fridman podcast clip. They acknowledge Rust's strengths in memory safety and new projects, especially for parsing and networking, but criticize the community's tendency to push full rewrites of existing codebases. Key concerns include incomplete feature parity in rewrites (the 80/90% problem), poor interoperability with existing C/C++ code, and a fundamental limitation: rewriting C in Rust for security gains is undermined when performance-critical handwritten assembly is still required, since assembly can jump anywhere in memory and breaks the security model entirely. The speakers suggest compile-time instrumented assembly as a more realistic path forward.
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