Bryan Cantrill on What’s Next for Infrastructure, Open Source & Rust

Bryan Cantrill's talk at the ScyllaDB Summit 2022 reflects on past technological predictions he made with fellow infrastructure technologists at Sun Microsystems, analyzing which predictions were accurate and which were not. His insights emphasize that predictions often reveal more about the present mindset than future events. Notably, while they foresaw developments like the iPhone and the decline of Dennard scaling, they missed major trends such as cloud computing and open source's transformative potential. Cantrill now focuses on how existing technologies can evolve, highlighting the growing ubiquity of compute, the democratizing potential of open FPGAs and HDLs, the maturity of open source EDA tools like KiCad, and the rise of open source firmware. He also emphasizes Rust's revolutionary impact on system software, particularly for embedded systems. Cantrill believes these technologies have reached an inflection point where they will become more widespread and influential due to their open nature, suggesting a future of hardware-software co-design.