Radar · Rust · #001 · Week 39 · Sep 21 – 27, 2026

Maintainer spotlight: Alejandra González (@blyxyas)

Nice to knowtooling

What changed: The Inside Rust blog interviewed Alejandra González, who has contributed to Rust for about four years, joined the Clippy team in 2023 and is one of the first Maintainers in Residence. Her first contribution was a Clippy lint that warns when ^ is used as if it meant "to the power of".
Production impact: The source does not say.
Try it: Run the program below: 2 ^ 3 is 1, because ^ is exclusive or; use pow for powers.
Source: blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/09/21/maintainer-spotlight-alejandra-gonzalez-blyxyas/

Understand it, then run it

Clippy is the Rust linter: it reads your code and points out mistakes and better ways to write things. It has over 800 lints, and the post explains that each one is a single Rust file you can read on its own, which is why it is a common first place to contribute.

Alejandra's first contribution was one of those lints. In some languages ^ means "to the power of", but in Rust it is exclusive or, so 2 ^ 3 is 1, not 8. The lint catches code that looks like it meant the power.

Run it now

Todayrust

// Alejandra González's first Clippy lint warns when ^ is used as if it meant
// "to the power of". In Rust, as in C and Go, ^ is exclusive or (XOR).
fn main() {
    let xor = 2 ^ 3; // 0b10 XOR 0b11 = 0b01
    let power = 2_i32.pow(3); // 2 to the power of 3
    println!("2 ^ 3        = {xor}  (exclusive or: {:#04b} ^ {:#04b} = {:#04b})", 2, 3, xor);
    println!("2_i32.pow(3) = {power}  (the power you meant)");
    println!("10_f64.powi(2) = {}  (floats have powi and powf)", 10_f64.powi(2));
}

What it printed when we ran it on Rust 1.98.1 (edition 2024)

2 ^ 3        = 1  (exclusive or: 0b10 ^ 0b11 = 0b01)
2_i32.pow(3) = 8  (the power you meant)
10_f64.powi(2) = 100  (floats have powi and powf)

Run sends this program (for Solidity, the contract and its tests) to our own sandbox, where it is compiled and run once, with no network, and what it printed or the test report comes back here. Nothing is kept. Runs are counted per visitor for the day so everyone gets a turn; the details are on the legal page.

Written by gpt-oss-120b from the linked source · claims checked against the sources · human-reviewed