Hi, I’m Pascal Hertleif

• Dev tools team
• CLI WG
• {twitter,github}.com/killercup
• Rust-centric blog: deterministic.space

[…] getting things right

– Pascal, writing presumptuous talk titles

What is Rust?

A systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.

What is Rust?

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

What is Rust?

Technology from the past come to save the future from itself

– Graydon Hoare, inventor of Rust

Prior art

all information that has been made available to the public in any form before a given date that might be relevant to a patent’s claims of originality.

– Wikipedia

We don’t need to re-invent everything

Embrace existing ideas and put them into our current context.

This is not a “Rewrite it in Rust” talk

For example:
The borrow checker

Problem: Write memory-safe high-performance code

Prior art

Prior art

Affine logic

Prior art

This work is about a functional language $Λ_{LA}$, with a typable sub-set $Λ^{T}_{LA}$. The types for $Λ^{T}_{LA}$ are polymorphic formulas of Intuitionistic Light Affine Logic […]

– Roversi, Luca. “Light affine logic as a programming language: a first contribution.” International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science 11.01 (2000): 113-152.

[…] Rust finally nailed it down in a way that is accessible to everyone.

– Stjepan Glavina

Adapting to the current context

Original borrowck doesn’t understand all valid programs

Another example: ripgrep

super fast competitor to grep and ag

uses Rust’s regex crate

Prior art (regex)

• Pike VM
• Boyer-Moore & Aho-Corasick
• Lazy DFA
• Teddy

Adapting to the current context

• Bringing it all together
• Unicode support
• Highly concurrent

Why sort() is like it is

I was reading the previous implementation of sort, just out of curiosity, and thought “wait, this could be done better”.

– Stjepan Glavina

Prior art

• current impl
• regular merge sort
• blocksort
• timsort
• …

(See Rust PR #38192 for details)

Community

This was Stjepan’s first PR for Rust!

Where to find inspiration: Other ecosystems

crossbeam-channel

An improvement for the channels in std

Other examples

• parking_lot
• hashbrown

Where to find inspiration: Academia

So many awesome engineering projects can be pulled off by just taking a quick glance at where current research is at in a particular field.

Often, implementations are lagging by several decades.

– Tyler Neely

Where to find interesting papers

• Papers We Love (paperswelove.org)
• the morning paper (blog.acolyer.org)

Most of the things I read have no useful application for me right away. I need to let them simmer for a while.

– Geoffroy Couprie

Whenever something interesting comes out of academia, I try to think: How do we make this more practical? Can we reach a little bit farther? Can we bend the curve somewhere?

– Stjepan Glavina

“bend the curve”

The community is trying to find a way to overcome traditional trade-offs

Another tale: Green threads

• Rust used green threads for async I/O
• They were removed
• Not the easy thing to do, but pays off in the long run

It’s okay to iterate on ideas

The first version might not be perfect

I think of Rust as fertile ground for growing cool stuff.

– Stjepan Glavina

Do ambitious things!

1. Be curious!
2. Try to bend the curve!
3. Help people discover awesome things!

Where to look for inspiration

1. Other ecosystems
2. Academia
3. Completely different areas?

Thank you!

I’m Pascal and I want you to talk to me!

{twitter,github}.com/killercup

Slides: git.io/rust-approach