A Tale of Teaching Rust
summary
A quarter‑length class teaches Rust to 26 undergraduates over three weeks, focusing on ownership/borrowing/lifetimes, Send/Sync and rustlings exercises. Assignments include a partially completed dining‑philosophers that reveals about one third of submissions compile but break the problem, and a CVE analysis showing where Rust would prevent memory bugs. Students report the compiler is picky, syntax feels odd, yet most become more confident and many want to continue using Rust.
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chapters (26)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:03The Pitch
- 2:56Week 3: Explain why it matters
- 3:32What's the approach?
- 4:27Suggestions: 1. Do examples beforehand 2. Treat rustc as a teacher 3. Don't fake it
- 5:19Rust Playground The (New) Rust Book Rustlings Godbolt
- 6:13The Class
- 7:01Aliasing XOR Mutability
- 7:12Emphasize the rules Give lots of examples Show some complex cases
- 8:55Sometimes you need code that's generic over lifetimes
- 9:37Assignment: do the move semantics Rustlings exercises
- 10:05Threads w/out data races
- 11:11Introduce the key stdlib types: Arc, Rc, Mutex, RwLock
- 11:33Make clear that Rust stops data races, not race conditions
- 12:23Assignment: solve the Dining Philosophers problem
- 14:04Safety & Security
- 14:18Explain Safe Rust & Unsafe Rust
- 15:18Unsafe Rust can't trust Safe Rust
- 15:54Safety lies at the module boundary
- 16:38Assignment: find a CVE that could have been stopped by Rust
- 18:06The Results
- 18:44And the syntax was weird
- 19:38Students felt Rust was really powerful
- 20:07Students felt more confident than they did with C++
- 20:21The ergonomics initiative will help new Rustaceans!
- 21:14Conclusion
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