Rust: Make system programming great again!

[2016-10-29 Sat 14:45:54] speaker: Omer Iqbal event: GeekcampSG 2016

heartbleed

memory safety

GC bro?

• non deterministic destruction
• needs much more memory to be efficient
• sweep pass reads from almost all RAM leading to power inefficiency
• pauses not acceptable for hard realtime systems

Rust, a systems programming language focused on

• safety
• speed
• concurrency

Rust in a nutshell

• immutable by default let mut y = 10;
• strongly typed with inference let x: i32 = 42;
• vectors let v = vec![1,2,3,4,5];, vec! is a macro

Rust memory model

• variables own the entities they are bound to
• when they go out of scope, the entities are destroyed
• compiler ensures there is only one binding per entity
• primitives implement Copy trait
• &T is a reference, reference borrow ownership, are immutable
• &mut T is a mutable reference
• borrowing rules:
  • any borrow must be within the scope of the owner
  • can have (1 &mut T) XOR (1 or more &T)

Rust defaults to static dispatch to enable inlining