Rust in Production: ClickHouse
This podcast episode explores how ClickHouse uses Rust in production, discussing the integration of Rust components into their C++ codebase, the performance and safety benefits achieved, and the engineering challenges faced when adopting Rust at scale in a high-performance database system.
Background
- ClickHouse is an open-source, column-oriented database (DBMS) famous for running SQL queries over billions of rows in real time. Used by Uber, eBay, Cloudflare for analytics, monitoring, and logging.
- Rust is a systems programming language focused on memory safety and speed, without a garbage collector. It's increasingly adopted in infrastructure projects where C/C++ used to dominate.
- This podcast episode explores how the ClickHouse team (a mostly C++ codebase) has been integrating Rust into new components like the query optimizer and the "keeper" coordination service — a real-world case study in safely mixing Rust with legacy C++.
- The episode is part of "Rust in Production" by Corrode, a consultancy that interviews engineers at major companies about their practical Rust adoption experiences.