Supercharging Your Tooling With Rust

Mael discusses the evolution of Yarn from its origins in 2016 to the current version being developed in Rust. Yarn's stability and familiarity with the codebase led to the decision to build Yarn 6 in Rust, despite challenges faced with previous rewrites and limitations of Yarn 4. Large companies using Yarn faced latency issues due to the number of workspaces. Yarn aimed for improved performance with features like lazy install to enhance user experience. Yarn aimed to be exceptionally fast, catering to various ecosystems beyond JavaScript, like Python and Rust, to enhance usability. Yarn faced challenges with breaking changes and friction during the rewrite to Yarn 2, emphasizing the importance of careful implementation in Yarn 6's development. Learning a new language was a key part of the rewrite process, with significant progress in test passing and personal proficiency in Rust. Developing in Rust led to a growth in personal proficiency and revealed insights into Rust's tooling and concurrency benefits. Rust revealed experimental features and concurrency benefits, requiring mental model shifts. Rust's human-written code rewrite with AI assistance. Challenges of integrating Yarn rewrite with Rust version and freezing main branch for rewrites. Considerations for rewriting projects in Rust, YARN's improved performance, and the importance of motivation and resilience in such endeavors. YARN's expansion to support multiple ecosystems and the invitation to engage in devlogs and share feedback on the talk and rewrite.