Rust Belt Rust

Oct 28, 2017

Rust Belt Rust

I have been an avid reader of Y Combinator’s Hacker News for about a year now, and all through that time I had been hearing about this new systems programming language called Rust, that was considered to be a strong contender to replace C++ (and maybe C) as the new systems programming language of choice. I was very curious about this, since I’ve been incresingly been interested in the areas of operating systems, ubiquitous systems and compilers. At some point while reading the comments of one of these articles, I came across a comment that mentioned an upcoming conference on the language and after looking at the web page I was amazed to find out they also had open applications for people who were from underepresented groups in the technology industry. Since I hadn’t seen many mexican softwate developers like myself, I thought I’d give it a try and apply. Two weeks later, I was ecstatic to find out that I had received the scholarhsip! Not only did it covere the flight, but it also covered my lodging at a nearby hotel, and it offered me a spot in the Rustbrige workshop, which would be an all-day introduction to the language. Super awesome! I’m happy to say that in the past couple of days I was fortunate to attend the Rust Belt Rust conference, which turned out to be a great experience.

Getting to the conference and Day 1

I arrived on Wednesday evening to my hotel, and Thursday morning I headed for the conference. After an introduction, everyone headed to their respective workshops. I headed to the Rustbridge one, where we learned about syntax, how Rust implements the functional paradigm and tried to test our knowledge by coding some exercises.Not only wasthe workshop lead by awesome instructors, we even had a member of the Rust Core team there to answer any and all questions that we had. Coming from Scala, there was a lot of crossover concepts wise, but a lot of surprising things as well (println!() a macro instead of a function anyone?). For lunch we split into groups, and adventured into the city. After, we decided to keep learning a bit more by taking on building a simple web server in rust. And when I say simple, I mean simple (less than 30 lines long!). The instructors had made a framework heavily inspired by the NodeJs example and we were able to have a website up and running in no time. This was really exciting as, I had in some previous era implemented a simple C server and man was that not very straightforward to beginners at all. Thank you Ashley and Steve!

Swag given at the conference, cute crab!

After the end of the day, everyone went to a Facebook sponsored beer/food dinner gathering. You have to give it to large tech companies, they really try to recruit everyone qualified, everywhere.

Day 2

Day 2 was focused exclusively on presentations. I got to listen to recent developments of the language, which focused on ergonomics and the current “Impl” period. The Impl period is the section of the year where the rust language team stops any discussion on features of the language and purely concentrates on the implementation of said features. So avoids the talking the talk and walks the walk on everything that had been discussed during the previous months. Interestingly to me was finding out the design of the language happened through RFC documents specific to the language.

Of particular interest to me were the development of Rust IDE support for the open-source IDE KDevelop, the lightning talk on Rust running on bare metal, and the motivational talk about becoming a contributor. I would be interested in trying my luck on [using Rust for to make an operating system][rust_embedded] since it seems it might be more approachable than C or C++. But we’ll see what happens, and if I even have time to do that. On another note, I absolutely loved Chris Krycho’s talk about becoming a contributor. The sense of empowerment had after seeing how one of the most well known voices of the language and its ecosystem had started by just fixing a typo as its first contribution is something you don’t hear everyday. In fact I think the “getting started in X project” stories should be something more widely discussed, since contributing to a large project can be daunting to many people.

Overall, this was a great experience and I’m very happy I was able to be a part of it. I honestly look forward in being a contributor to the Rust project, and will be sure to post my experience here. For now, good bye Ohio!

Rustbridge group photo (our hands are crab claws; Rust adopted the crab as its mascot):