LDN Talks November 2018

Agenda:

• Welcome & networking
• News and Announcements
• Main Speaker: Pierre Chevalier (Maidsafe) - Rust: Beyond the language, an ecosystem.
• Speaker: Jamie Brandon - Writing an Electron app in 100% native Rust
• Lightning Speaker: TBD

We're being hosted by Mozilla at their offices near London Bridge Station.

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Pierre will give a talk on how they use Rust in production at Maidsafe:

Rust: Beyond the language, an ecosystem:

As a language, rust gives you safety, performance and high level abstractions. This is more than any other language can claim in 2018. This is reason enough to use rust in performance and security critical projects such as the SAFE Network.

By using rust to implement PARSEC, a novel consensus protocol many orders of magnitudes faster than the blockchain, we were reminded that beyond the language, the entire rust ecosystem conspires to making your projects successful.

In this talk, we will use our experience writing production code in rust to convey all the benefits we received from being part of this inclusive ecosystem. Beyond the compiler and the great toolchain that comes with it, we will share concrete examples of many different aspects of the wider rust environment that make it so enjoyable to write production code with confidence.

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Jamie will discuss writing an Electron app using 100% native Rust:

Electron is a popular way to write cross-platform GUI apps in JavaScript.
Others have already written electron apps in Rust, either by compiling the Rust code to WebAssembly and writing the UI code in Rust directly, or by linking the Rust code as a native library and writing the UI code in JavaScript.

These are both sensible approaches. But compiling to WebAssembly rules out using threads, sockets and any native libraries that rely on them, as well as native tools like gdb and valgrind. And writing the UI code in JavaScript requires, well, writing JavaScript. Wouldn't it be nice if we could have the best of both worlds - write the UI code in Rust but still have access to all our favorite libraries and tools?

I'll demo a proof-of-concept Electron app written entirely in native Rust, and show how to manipulate the DOM, trigger animation frames and attach event callbacks without ever leaving Rust.