Twin Cities Code Camp

Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents almost all crashes, and eliminates data races. It accomplishes these goals by being memory safe without using garbage collection. And it just hit 1.0.

This presentation will provide an introduction to the Rust programming language, what it's good at, and why you might prefer it over C for your next project requiring low-level optimization. I'll also demonstrate using common C-style FFI mechanisms to call into functions written in Rust from other programming languages, like Python, Ruby, or Node.js.

Rust is already being used in nontrivial, real-world projects. At Skylight (http://skylight.io), Yehuda Katz is wrapping Rust inside a Ruby gem in order to profile Rails app performance with "low enough overhead that you can leave it always-on in production" (http://blog.skylight.io/our-new-featherweight-agent/). At Mozilla Research, the Servo project (https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Design) is using Rust to "develop a new Web browser engine [...] that takes advantage of parallelism at many levels while eliminating common sources of bugs and security vulnerabilities associated with incorrect memory management and data races."