We sat down with Ralf Jung who is, at the time of this recording, a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS). Ralf is part of the RustBelt project, which seeks to define and develop rigorous formal foundations for the Rust programming language. 

We talked with Ralf about GhostCell, a technique for separating permissions from data in Rust that opens up possibilities and alternative strategies when it comes to working around Rust's "aliasing XOR mutability" rules, why there seems to be such a large gap between academic programming languages and "mainstream" programming languages, as well as what makes for a good PL researcher. 

Ralf blogs about Rust, and other topics, at https://www.ralfj.de/blog/. 

matthieu-m's Ghost Collections crate is referenced during the show and can be found at https://github.com/matthieu-m/ghost-collections.

Send us an email at buildingwithrust@gmail.com to suggest cool people or projects in the Rust ecosystem you'd like us to have on the show!