Understanding Rust; or how I learned to stop worrying and love the borrow-checker

YOW! Brisbane 2024

You've seen the Github surveys, you've seen the cool stuff Amazon, Oxide and even Microsoft are working on, and you want to get in on the action. So you fire up Code and start your first project. And the borrow-checker immediately crushes your hopes and dreams.

If this sounds familiar, this is the talk for you.

Rust can be very welcoming, but it expects you to abide by a few rules that other languages regard as optional. In this talk Steve Smith will take you through what these core rules are and why they exist, drawing comparisons to existing programming techniques such as garbage collection and resource management. He will also introduce some of the tools that Rust gives you to work with its rules rather than against them, produce more elegant code, and emerge at the end a better programmer.

Prerequisites: Some experience with Rust is helpful but not necessary.