The Rust BASH!

We are delighted to announce the first BASH Meetup of 2021!

On 26th February we will host an event on the Rust language, with 3 excellent talks from local experts. Come along to discover why Rust has beguiled and delighted developers - not just from the C++ community, but also Python, Scala and Go.

------- Talks ------

Talk 1: An Introductory Tour (Richard Gibson)

Rust has been Stack Overflow's most loved language for the past 5 years. Richard recently delved into Rust, to see what the fuss was all about. In this talk he will:

• Give a brief tour of the Rust ecosystem
• Show how the type system deals with memory management, nullability and error handling
• Possibly talk a little too much about this new found love...

Talk 2: Oxidising Your Codebase (Chris Nixon)

Among the latest crop of languages, Rust is uniquely suited for integration into existing codebases. It has the ability to expose a C compatible API, and no GC or runtime to speak of. This makes Rust as easy, cheap and fast to call as C or C++.

This talk will cover the tools and libraries for binding Rust via C APIs. Plus a preview of the future using WebAssembly.

Talk 3: The Rust GCC Compiler (Philip Herron)

Rust is an officially supported option for writing Linux kernel drivers. This has led to concerns regarding security vulnerabilities in mixed binaries. The solution is to have a GCC implementation of Rust, alongside the established (LLVM based) compiler. This led Open Source Security, with support from Embecosm, to fund the Rust GCC project and hire Philip full time.

Rust GCC was started back in 2014 by Philip, when Rust was still at version 0.8. Today the compiler has a parser capable of handling all Rust code. It has reached the milestone of compiling the core of Rust. Support for generics, traits, pattern-matching and macros are still under development.

This talk introduces the Rust GCC Compiler, the motivations behind its development and things Philip is learning along the way.

------- Bios ------

Richard Gibson has over 15 years experience as a developer and consultant. Mostly spent building back-end, distributed systems in Erlang, Scala and Kotlin. His passion is for Pure Functional Programming, which he regularly presents on and teaches.

Chris Nixon is a long time Rust fan and advocate. He's currently working in Rust full time at LogDNA, mostly on their high performance, Open Source logging agent.

Philip Herron is employed by Embecosm to work full time on adding Rust to the GNU toolchain. Besides compilers, you can find him on Github tinkering with a Doom clone (in Python/Go) and writing about the compiler on his blog.