Last weekend I landed a PR that adds support for defining custom native classes in Neon. This means you can create JavaScript objects that internally wrap—and own—a Rust data structure, along with methods that can safely access the internal Rust data.

As a quick demonstration, suppose you have an Employee struct defined in Rust:

pub struct Employee {
    id: i32,
    name: String,
    // etc ...
}

If you’re a JavaScript programmer who’s been intrigued by Rust’s hack without fear theme—making systems programming safe and fun—but you’ve been waiting for inspiration, I may have something for you! I’ve been working on Neon, a set of APIs and tools for making it super easy to write native Node modules in Rust.

When Chris Beard first announced that over a thousand Mozilla staff and contributors would be descending on Portland this month for an all-hands work week, I worried about two things. I knew a couple of the groups in my department would be approaching deadlines. And I was afraid that so many groups of people in one place would be chaotic and hard to coordinate. I wasn’t even wrong – but it didn’t matter.