The Rust Programming Language and Free Software Development at Scale

Fast

<ketralnis> Rust is also really phobic of heap allocations […]
<Xion>      Yes, Rust encourages everyone to be a full stack developer :)

• Explicit control over memory
• No GC overhead
• Zero Cost Abstractions
• Built on top of llvm

Safe

"Rust is like a big bucket of solder and wire, with the promise
 that you can't electrocute yourself."

--frankmcsherry

• Memory safe without GC
• No Nulls!
• No mutable aliasing
• Automatic bounds checking

Concurrent

"Rust is like doing parkour while suspended on strings & wearing
 protective gear. Yes, it will sometimes look a little ridiculous,
 but you'll be able to do all sorts of cool moves without hurting
 yourself."
--Ilogiq

• Threading without Data Races
• Safety without copying
• Async IO with Futures/Tokio

Other Awesome Features

• Local Type inference
• Immutable by default
• Unicode Strings
• Sum Types
• Exhaustive pattern matching
• Trait based Generics
• Modern Module system
• No Runtime
• Compiles to WebAssembly
• Hygenic AST based Macros
• Compiler Plugins

Unsafe blocks

"Opening a vortex to Hell is actually safe, but de-referencing
 anything you pull from the vortex isn't safe."

--Steve Klabnik

• Access/Update static mutable variables
• Dereference a raw pointer
• Call other unsafe code

Examples

Hello World

fn main() {
    println!("hello, world");
}

Variables

fn main() {
    let one = 1u32;
    let mut three = 0;
    three = one + 2;
    print_number(three);
}

Types

struct Point(i32, i32);

enum Shape{
    Circle{centre: Point},
    Rectangle{top_left: Point, bottom_right: Point},
}

Match

fn main() {
    let obj = Shape::Rectangle{top_left: Point(0,0),
                               bottom_right: Point(0, 0)};
    match obj {
        Shape::Circle{centre: Point(x, y)} => {
            println!("It's a circle centred at {},{}", x, y)
        },
        Shape::Rectangle{top_left: _, bottom_right: _} => {
            println!("It's a rectangle, somewhere...")
        },
        _ => println!("It's something else, wait, what?"),
    }
}

Loads more, but they've not given me enough time!

Rustc

"Diagnostics are the UX of a compiler, and so they're deserving of the
 exact same care that is put into mobile app or Web design."

--pcwalton

• Written in Rust
• Backed by llvm

Rustup

• Toolchain manager
• Rustc
• Cargo
• Docs
• Rustc/stdlib Sources

Cargo

"The Rust standard libs aren't quite batteries included, but they come
 with a pile of adaptor cables and an optional chemistry lab."
--Gankro

• Modern Dependency manager
• Build Tool
• Cross compilation
• Static compilation

Crates.io

< durka42  > rust has a culture of small crates
< XMPPwocky> a Cargo cult, if you will

• Central package repository
• Thousands of packages
• Mandatory SemVer

Rustfmt

• Idea Blatantly stolen from Go
• Standardised format for all code

The Present

Rustc is one of the largest Projects on Github

• ~61000 commits
• ~1700 unique contributors
• ~20000 issues (~3000 open)
• ~20000 PRs (~100 open)
• ~7500 Crates on crates.io
• 6 weekly release train

The Past

• Personal Project (2006-2010)
• Adopted by Mozilla (2010)
• RFC Process Introduced (2014)
• 1.0 (May 2015)

The Future

Servo

"There is essentially no webpage out there that it cannot get
 through at multiple hundreds of frames-per-second"

-- pcwalton

• Free Software, on Github
• Next Generation browser engine
• Exploit Parallelism
• Aggressively offload to the GPU

Language Teams

• Core Team
• Language Design Team
• Compiler Team
• Library Team
• Tooling and Infra
• Docs Team
• Community Team
• Moderation Team
• Strike Teams

Submitting Code/Docs

• Submit a PR
• Make sure it builds and passes tests!
• Get it reviewed
• Tweak until Approved

RFC Process

• Create an RFC with your feature idea
• Summary, Motivation, Detailed Design, How do we teach this?, Drawbacks, Alternatives, Unresolved Questions
• Get it reviewed
• Tweak until Approved

Automation

Rust's Most prolific Contributors (The Bots)

• Highfive
• Bors/Homu

Continuous integration

• Every PR built and tested
• All Supported Operating Systems
• All Supported Architectures