The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Data Infrastructure Systems and the Rust / WebAssembly Combo with A.J. Hunyady of InfinyOn

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with A.J. Hunyady, Founder and CEO of InfinyOn.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Costas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? I am, of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. As always, a fascinating conversation with AJ from Infineon. We covered a lot of subjects. Hadoop, IoT, real-time streaming, Rust, WebAssembly.

Costas, I'm actually interested, what interested you most in terms of the conversation about Rust and WebAssembly? I mean, Rust is obviously very popular and gaining in popularity, but anything that stuck out to you? Yeah, especially in comparison with Kafka and let's say this previous generation of data infrastructure systems

and system programming in general that was very biased towards technologies like the JVM. And we see that today, because of technologies like Rust, systems programming has become much more accessible to more people. And the overall, like the whole, let's say, Rust ecosystem has created many new opportunities. And I think Infineon,, both the company and the product, is an example of many similar things that we are going to see in the future. Companies embracing these new paradigms and these new frameworks.

And in a way, let's say, rebuild and adapt technologies and paradigms from the past, but make them much more efficient and much more compatible with the needs and the scale that we have today and tomorrow. Rust is, I think it's interesting, not just because of, let's say, the performance that most people talk about, I think. And that's the interesting part when we are comparing with the JVM ecosystem. JVM became popular because people could go and write code without having to deal with all the issues and the problems that usually arise by having to manage memory,

which is a pretty hard problem. Now, Rust is a new type of language that gives you, let's say, the low-level access and performance that you get with a language like C, right, where you have to go and manage memory. But at the same time, the compiler is smart enough that guides you to manage the memory correctly. So when actually the program compiles, it's going to be safe. Like it's going to operate like as it should without like security issues or

crashing and like all that stuff and like avoiding many bugs and made that like available to more, let's say, developers, like compared to the past. That's one of the things that I think is like a great enabler of a language like Rust. The other thing is that Rust has this amazing, let's say, ecosystem, and that's where WebAssembly comes into the picture, and which makes very interesting Infineon also, what they are building. Because as AJ said, like in a way, this combination of Rust and WebAssembly gives them the opportunity to build a system that's like extremely extensible. So someone can go like, for example, write like a plugin or a function for

the Infineon platform using and compile that into WebAssembly, and this is going to run inside the Infineon platform. And this is going to be super performant and super safe and secure at the same time because of the guarantees that WebAssembly has. So these two examples, like the new way of like writing systems, programming for systems, and the interoperability that WebAssembly provides, I think it's going to revolutionize a lot like what is happening on the server, although WebAssembly

was like primarily built for the client. And it's just the beginning. Like what Infineon is actually doing today, I think it's going to be something we will see more and more in the future. So for anyone who is interested in like what's next,

they should definitely check what Infineon does and what AJ has to say about the things that they are building. Absolutely. Definitely a must listen for anyone interested in those topics. So yeah, definitely subscribe if you haven't. Tell a friend. We always love new listeners and we will catch you on the next one