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

YOW! Sydney 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 an editor 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 some of these core rules 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 learn to love the borrow-checker.

Prerequisites: Knowledge of the basics of Rust at the post-tutorial level.