The Perl and Raku Conference 2023 in Toronto

Rust is an exciting new(ish) programming language that aims to make high-performance systems programming safer and easier. Come to this talk to learn what Rust is all about.

Rust is a low-level language that has been voted the most-loved programming language in the Stack Overflow survey for seven years straight. This talk aims to show you why.

If you’ve programmed in Perl for long enough, you’ve probably needed to reach for a faster language from time to time, like C or C++. And if you’ve done that, you also know why so many people prefer high-level languages like Perl to low-level languages like C or C++!

Rust brings several interesting features to low-level programming. Rust uses its borrow checker to enforce memory and thread safety without a garbage collector, and with no need for manual malloc and free calls. It also features an advanced type system that requires you to explicitly handle errors, eliminates the billion-dollar null pointer mistake, and allows you to express complex constraints that can be enforced at compile-time through type definitions.

This talk will cover some of the most interesting features of Rust, complete with code examples. There’s not enough time to teach you how to code in Rust, but this talk will help you decide whether learning Rust is something that you want to do.