Rust Interview Questions for Developers

Rust is a versatile language commonly used for systems programming and noted for its memory safety, popularity with performance-critical applications, and its interoperability with C libraries.

Rust was created by Graydon Hoare, a Mozilla employee, as a personal project starting in 2006. It was later adopted by Mozilla and announced as an official project in 2010. The first stable release, Rust 1.0, was launched on May 15, 2015.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

To evaluate the Rust expertise of developers in coding interviews, we have provided hands-on coding exercises and interview questions below.

Additionally, we have outlined a set of suggested best practices to ensure that your interview questions accurately measure the candidates’ Rust skills.

Rust example question

Help us design a parking lot app

Hey candidate! Welcome to your interview. Boilerplate is provided. Feel free to change the code as you see fit. To run the code at any time, please hit the run button located in the top left corner.

Goals: Design a parking lot using object-oriented principles

Here are a few methods that you should be able to run:

• Tell us how many spots are remaining
• Tell us how many total spots are in the parking lot
• Tell us when the parking lot is full
• Tell us when the parking lot is empty
• Tell us when certain spots are full e.g. when all motorcycle spots are taken
• Tell us how many spots vans are taking up

Assumptions:

• The parking lot can hold motorcycles, cars and vans
• The parking lot has motorcycle spots, car spots and large spots
• A motorcycle can park in any spot
• A car can park in a single compact spot, or a regular spot
• A van can park, but it will take up 3 regular spots
• These are just a few assumptions. Feel free to ask your interviewer about more assumptions as needed

Interview best practices for Rust roles

For successful Rust interviews, it’s important to consider various factors, such as the candidates’ experience level and the specific engineering role they’re applying for. To ensure that your Rust interview questions yield the best results, we recommend adhering to the following best practices when interacting with candidates:

• Devise technical questions that correspond to real-world scenarios within your organization. This approach will not only engage the candidate but also allow you to better evaluate their fit for your team.
• Encourage candidates to ask questions during the interview and cultivate a cooperative atmosphere.
• You may want to consider assessing the candidate’s knowledge of popular Rust libraries like Tokio, Serde, and Actix/Rocket.

Furthermore, it’s crucial to observe standard interview practices when conducting Rust interviews. This includes adjusting the question difficulty based on the candidate’s skill level, providing timely feedback on their application status, and allowing candidates to ask about the assessment or collaborate with you and your team.