Nicholas Nethercote
Software Engineer at Rust Project
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNicholas Nethercote is a senior software engineer and Rust compiler maintainer with over two decades of industry and research experience, including a PhD from Cambridge. He has driven large-scale performance and memory-improvement projects at Mozilla (4,000+ Firefox commits) and led efforts that made the Rust compiler multiple times faster, now contributing thousands of commits across rustc, rustfmt, clippy and related tooling. Skilled in low-level systems work—profilers, allocators, MIR, and benchmarking—he blends deep technical craft with mentoring and cross-team leadership. His open-source footprint spans high-profile projects like Firefox, Valgrind, servo, curl and rustfmt, and he authored The Rust Performance Book and a long-running compiler performance blog series. Based in Melbourne and focused on remote roles, he prefers work that advances compilers, tooling, and correctness rather than hotspots like crypto or generative AI. An unusual strength is his sustained impact on both production browsers and core compiler internals, bridging academia and operational engineering.
22 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at University of CambridgeThe University of Melbourne
Github Skills (73)
parserator10
parser10
addin10
web-application10
lexer10
compiler-development10
testing10
c1110
render10
refactor10
c1710
hyper10
gpu10
profiling10
async-await10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
rust-lang/rust
Sep 2016 - Dec 2022
Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1093 reviews, 1143 commits, 1127 PRs in 6 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily worked on low-level aspects of the Rust compiler, focused on MIR (Mid-level Intermediate Representation) and its related components. Their contributions involved refactoring code to improve efficiency and clarity, modifying core compiler structures like `TokenKind` and `TokenStream`, and fixing bugs in the lexer and parser. They also worked on code generation aspects and error reporting, and also added testing infrastructure and functionality.
crategarbage-collectionrustreliablecompiler
mozilla/sccache
Jun 2018 - Jun 2020
Sccache is a ccache-like tool. It is used as a compiler wrapper and avoids compilation when possible. Sccache has the capability to utilize caching in remote storage environments, including various cloud storage options, or alternatively, in local storage.
Role in this project:Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:10 PRs, 1 push, 16 comments in 2 years
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily contributed to improving the sccache project's error handling and codebase maintainability. Their work included modifying error messages, removing unused error kinds, and refactoring the code with rustfmt to ensure consistent formatting. Furthermore, the user modernized the project by migrating the error handling library from `error-chain` to `anyhow`, and introduced a check to the CI process, demonstrating a focus on improving the development workflow.
cloud-storageccachecachestorage
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