I got to attend RustConf in September1, and felt these talks in particular may interest someone working on FxA2:
- The keynote isn’t too important to watch if you’re not that involved in Rust. It’s mostly talking about the 2017 plan. But, worth mentioning, is that part of that plan for 2017 is to target and improve Rust libraries for writing server software. A small piece of that is hyper, a Rust HTTP library I work on. Maybe we can start to consider writing some of our software in Rust in 2017.
Futures - The Rust community has been working rapidly on a very promising concept to write asynchronous code in Rust. You likely are pretty comfortable with how Promises work in JavaScript. The Futures library in Rust feels very similar to JavaScript Promises, but! But! They compile down to an optimized state machine, without the need to allocate a whole bunch of closures like JavaScript does.
On top of the Futures library, the community is working on a library that is “futures + network IO”, and that’s tokio. It’s a framework designed to help anyone build a network protocol library. A big user of this is hyper. The examples in hyper show how expressive this pattern can be, while still being super fast.
How to do community RFCs - Rust has a method for the community to suggest improvements to the language, which they call RFCs. These are very similar in practice to Python’s PEPs. It’s been quite successful, and other notable projects have adopted it as well, such as Ember.js. In fact, the RFC process from Rust is what I looked at when we were adjusting how to do our FxA Features. This talk showed how truly impressive it is that the community can work together at designing a better feature.
Rust is a great way to learn how to do systems programming - This was a really special talk about how someone who may be scared of the ominous “systems programming” can actually dive right in without worrying about blowing off a (computer’s) leg. If you’ve mostly used “higher level” languages, and wondered how in the world to dive in, Julia has a great message for you.
If you don’t check out any other talk, at least look at this one. If videos aren’t your thing, try the written article form instead.