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A year of Rust in ClickHouse

This story is about how ClickHouse supports Rust components in the C++ code base and the challenges we had to overcome.

The first external pull request with Rust was to improve our terminal application, clickhouse-client, by adding interactive history navigation. However, these implementations were sketchy, with many corner cases unsupported, and they are not particularly pleasant to write (no C++ engineer can be excited by the task of "read this JSON file and follow the spec precisely"). This is because the interop between Rust and C++ requires writing the wrappers, and it has to be done with extra care to not mess up with things like who owns the memory, and in which order it is deallocated.

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