ConfPad

Aaron, Ashley, and Niko will deliver an update on the state of all things Rust. You don't want to miss it!

Space. It is often thought of as the final frontier for humans. Why not also for Rust? In the fall of 2017 we began using Rust on an upcoming CubeSat mission. Writing safe, performant software is a high priority for us, one shared by the aerospace industry. Our software framework was originally written in C but we wanted to explore other options which could …

This talk explores how to use the Rust Type System and Borrow Checker to write safe abstractions of hardware, even when using direct control of memory mapped peripherals with unsafe blocks. Because these techniques move all (or most) of the checking to compile time, these techniques are perfect for systems where high performance or resource constraints are a…

Every Rustacean reads the standard library docs (or some other library docs) sooner or later. Many Rustaceans have run cargo doc to generate some documentation for their own library or their dependencies. But how many have looked at the tool behind cargo doc? In this talk, I'll divulge some hidden secrets of rustdoc, the tool used by cargo doc to generate do…

The Raft consensus algorithm has been widely adopted in many companies to build a consistent distributed services that are highly available. This topic is about how we implemented Raft in rust to support TiKV, an open-Source distributed transactional Key-Value store. In this topic, I will first give a brief introduction about Raft, and then talk about our Ra…

Every moderately sized project is both a library and a consumer. Rust has an almost dizzying array of features that can be used to add structure and hide information. In this talk we'll discuss using types, traits, modules and crates as the tools of encapsulation. To show how they work together to effectively superseed similar information-hiding tools in pro…

"We all know that using C/C++ code in Rust is not too complicated. extern "C", bindgen and build.rs scripts make this pretty easy. But let’s challenge ourselves: what about the other way around? There are huge C and C++ projects that could use some corrosion. In this talk I will not just show simple examples of how to use Rust modules inside larger C/C++ app…

Although Rust is safer and more modern than C/C++, it is still difficult to justify the cost of migrating existing, mature systems code. This talk will present a trifecta of tools to address the costs and risks of such migration efforts. The first tool is a transpiler which generates structurally equivalent-yet-unsafe Rust code from the input C code. The sec…

As we develop the Rust eco-system we have a goal that "Rust should provide easy access to high quality crates". This means libraries must be both ergonomic and perform well. Rust provides various frameworks to help benchmark libraries however achieving performance past a certain point requires knowledge of some deep language constructs. This talk explores a …

So I've tried to introduce Rust at my $DAYJOB, and failed miserably. Failure can be a great catalyst for reflection, and indeed, there was a lot of valuable lessons to be learned! At this brief talk, I'll not only share the pitfalls to avoid, but the insights I've gained while trying to make Rust work for us (and maybe for you?).

In 2016, The Tor Project's network team decided to experiment with writing existing and new functionality in Rust. Since then, this experiment has turned into a team initiative, with multiple team members adding infrastructure and new functionality with the goal of integrating Rust components directly into the core Tor code base. By 2019, we will have severa…

Turtle is a Rust graphics crate for creating animated drawings. It is designed to be used to teach programming to complete beginners using Rust. In this talk, you'll learn the inner workings of turtle. We'll show you how we managed to create a library that is both full of features and very easy to learn. We'll go deep into how turtle works and tell you the k…

Mozilla has a data storage problem. There is no unified strategy for storing new user data and moving it between devices, which has led to a proliferation of stores and strategies and a fragile mechanism for syncing that only handles a subset of data collected. Project Mentat was born to help resolve these issues - a structured data store that is designed to…

"Have you heard the good news about WebAssembly? Since the unlamented demise of Flash, the only choice for writing web applications has been everyone's favorite punching bag of a programming language: JavaScript. WebAssembly defines a new binary format for code that can run natively from all major browsers. The best part is that you can write WebAssembly cod…

"What if Handlebars was a macro? Three years, 376 commits, and countless breaking changes later, I may have an answer to that. Maud is a macro for writing HTML web pages. It's like format!(), but for markup instead of text. This design lets it catch typos at compile-time, as well as run blazingly fast. This talk will cover lessons I learned while working on …

When you’re just starting out in Rust, you start by building small programs. As we all know though, medium and large projects can have very different, unique kinds of problems that smaller projects never encounter. As our projects grow in size, we need to be increasingly concerned about code organization, separation of concerns, implementation hiding, and ot…