When to actually rewrite it in rust?

This is the story of my rewrite of birdwatcher[1] in rust over a total period of three years.

It all started when I tried to fix a peculiar memory deallocation problem that occurred in the original go version of birdwatcher and failed. The garbage collector was just unwilling to release a bit of memory in time. Frustrated by hours of debugging and profiling I finally thought: The estrogen is working great, let's put on that extra spinny skirt and try this again in rust.

Join me on this journey through the dark world of state machines, concurrency, cache invalidation, profiling and regular expressions.

[1] Birdwatcher, for the uninitiated, is a small server that interacts with the BIRD routing daemon and exports the cli output as structured json to be consumed by the Alice Looking Glass.