Rust NYC Monthly Meetup

The first meetup of 2025, and we have Frank McSherry, the Chief Scientist at Materialize, as our speaker!

More than ten years ago, before Rust was 1.0, Frank published his first crate: columnar. Now, ten years later, he's dusted it off and updated it with modern Rust (and hindsight) as a solution to a hard problem he had: efficiently laying out the memory of complex Rust types, but using only safe and idiomatic Rust. Now, as then, it's super interesting and he's excited to tell you about it!

The crate makes it easy to perform the "array of structs to struct of arrays" transformation. This transformation goes beyond structs, on to enums (sum types), list types, and also recursively defined types. You end up with a representation that can be an order of magnitude faster to work with, in safe Rust, but trades away "ownership" to do so. We'll walk through the design, implementation, evaluation and next directions for the work, and he'd love your input!

Come on down to the Materialize HQ! Doors open at 6:30pm to give people plenty of time to grab pizza and socialize, and then Frank's talk starts at 7:30!

It should be a good time! Hope to see you there!