Rust NYC: Custom Metrics Collector & Embedded Rust!
Details
Join us on Wednesday, March 4th at our sponsor Nominal. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. to give attendees plenty of time to grab pizza and socialize, and the talk begin at 7:15 p.m. Following the success of the UnConf we've absorbed all of your feedback and have two awesome speakers!
Devon Tietjen is Co-Founder and CTO at Eden where they're building a high-performance heterogeneous database proxy layer in Rust. He has been working for the last 5 years in distributed computing and data infrastructure.
Writing a Customer Metrics Collector 104x Faster Than OpenTelemetry in Rust
While profiling Eden's Redis proxy on ARM hardware, we found that OpenTelemetry instrumentation was the single largest performance bottleneck, consuming more resources than the proxy itself and collapsing throughput by 85%. Hardware counters revealed the root cause: shared atomics behind OTel's counters and span lifecycle were thrashing cache lines across cores, stalling 55% of CPU cycles on memory coherency traffic and driving IPC below 0.04. The problem wasn't instruction count. Every metric recording triggered cross-core cache-line invalidation, turning nanosecond operations into 40-80ns round-trips.
We built a replacement telemetry library in Rust that eliminates shared mutable state on the recording hot path entirely. By avoiding contested atomics and keeping data core-local, we achieved an IPC of 1.4 with a 0.01% cache miss rate, recording over 4 billion events per second, 104x faster than OpenTelemetry. This talk walks through the hardware counter analysis that diagnosed the problem, the design decisions that solved it, and the Rust patterns that made a zero-contention architecture practical.
Cory Whitney is a Senior Embedded Software Engineer at Audinate
Hello World, the Hard Way: Embedded Rust on RP2040, ESP32-S3
Exploring three ways of developing an embedded Rust application for a wide range of microprocessors.
For this demo, we are joined by our beloved mascot Ferris the Crab! This one's a custom built animatronic crab featuring multiple arm waving animations accesible through a web UI, and even supports custom animations!
Many industries and domains are reaping the benefits of using the Rust programming language for their projects and products. We're seeing all of the major tech giants rewriting portions of their infrastructure in Rust. Industry adoption of Rust for embedded systems and Internet of Things (IoT) projects is growing meaningfully, but widespread support just isn't quite there yet. This is such an important moment in time as we are seeing increased demands for safety and security in our smart, edge, and IoT connected devices.
That's the pie in the sky anyway. The reality though is that not every development team can afford to use Rust for their next project. Somewhere early on in the product lifecycle someone picked a micro based on its price, peripherals, availability and other constraints. In many cases project timelines put constraints on the scope of the project and often times that means reusing processors, code, and tooling. Someone speaks up at the design meeting and mentions Rust and the mountain of benefits. The proposal is rejected as brief research shows that the vendor does not support Rust.
In this short lecture we cover three ways of getting Rust on a wide range of platforms, regardless of whether the vendor provides a Rust SDK. From zero to Hello World in one day, to going back to basics and bit banging registers as the purists before us have done. Also we cover a sneaky hybrid approach that leverages native vendor SDKs written in C. The title is a farce - it's all a lot easier than you think!
Lawrence Harvey is Rust NYC's official recruitment partner, with Ross providing support as a co-organizer and financial support.
The space is generously sponsored by our partner Nominal.