Intro to Rust

What is Rust?

“A language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.”

What kind of language is it?

• Ahead-of-time compiled
• Strong, affine types
• Minimal runtime, no garbage collector
• No runtime exceptions
• Functional programming, if you want it

What kind of language is it?

• Ahead-of-time compiled
• Strong, affine types
• Minimal runtime, no garbage collector
• No runtime exceptions
• Functional programming, if you want it
• Some* object orientation, if you want it

Advantages

• Correctness
• Fearless concurrency
• Memory safety
• Portability

Who is using Rust?

Consider Rust for problems with these properties:

Highly parallel
High availability requirements
High performance requirements
Low-level memory manipulation
Hardware binary portability
Language interoperability

Example - Visualizing the Mandelbrot set:

• Highly parallel
• High performance requirements
• Language interoperability

Mandelbrot Iteration

					use num_complex::Complex;

					fn abs(c: Complex<f64>) -> f64 {
					    (c * c.conj()).re
					}
					

Mandelbrot Iteration

					use num_complex::Complex;

					fn abs(c: Complex<f64>) -> f64 {
					    (c * c.conj()).re
					}

					pub fn mandelbrot(
					    c: Complex<f64>,
					    threshold: f64,
					    max_steps: u8
					) -> u8 {
					    let mut z = c.clone();
					    let mut i = 1u8;
					    while i < max_steps && abs(z) < threshold {
					        z = z * z + c;
					        i += 1;
					    }

					    // see: "Renormalizing the Mandelbrot Escape"
					    // https://linas.org/art-gallery/escape/escape.html
					    if i == max_steps {
				            max_steps
					    } else {
						    i + 1 - abs(z).log2().log10().round() as u8
					    }
					}
					

Rust libraries are Crates

Python Package

Thread-safe concurrency without the GIL

WebAssembly Module

Questions?