The Rusty Reality of OSS: Chasing Socket Leaks, Replacing DNS Libraries, and the Unseen Cost of Building in Public

Originally published on tamiz.pro.

Building in public sounds noble until you're three days into a socket leak that only manifests under 10k concurrent connections, your CI is red, and someone on Reddit asked if your crate is 'production-ready'.

This isn't a tutorial. It's a postmortem of what actually happens when you ship Rust code that other humans depend on.

The Socket Leak That Wasn't

I wrote a DNS resolver in Rust because trust-dns felt heavy. Three months later, a user reported that their proxy was leaking file descriptors. I ran lsof, saw thousands of open sockets, and immediately assumed the worst: a leak in my async runtime integration.