T8: Programming in Rust

Abstract

Rust is a new programming language for developing reliable and efficient systems. It is designed to support concurrency and parallelism in building platforms that take full advantage of modern hardware. Its static type system is safe and expressive and it provides strong guarantees about isolation, concurrency, execution, and memory safety.

Rust combines powerful and flexible modern programming constructs with a clear performance model to make program efficiency predictable and manageable. One important way it achieves this is by allowing fine-grained control over memory allocation through contiguous records and stack allocation. This control is balanced with the absolute requirement of safety: Rust’s type system and runtime guarantee the absence of data races, buffer overflow, stack overflow, or access to uninitialized or deallocated memory.

Tutorial objectives

This tutorial introduces Rust with a focus on the advanced type system features. We begin by installing Rust, and then work through a variety of examples, beginning with simple type definitions and proceeding through Rust's approach to affine and region types. These examples show a collection of programming patterns which tie into Rust language features, such as user-defined destructors, controlled memory aliasing, and lifetime-bounding parameters.

Target audience

Systems programmers who desire predictable performance and safe memory usage without a garbage collector.

Participants need Linux or OSX.

Felix Klock

Felix Klock is a Researcher at Mozilla. He works on the Rust compiler and runtime libraries, and obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Northeastern University. He previously worked on the ActionScript Virtual Machine for the Adobe Flash Runtime.

Lars Bergstrom.

Lars Bergstrom is a Researcher at Mozilla. He works on the Servo web browser engine and obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. He previously worked on Developer Tools at Microsoft.