Rust Programming Language Other conferences 2016, 21 Jun 2016

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From YouTube: The History of Rust

Description

Author: Steve Klabnik

Abstract:

The Rust programming language recently celebrated its one year anniversary since 1.0. While that's not a long time, there were eight years of development before that, which saw radical changes in the language. In this talk, Steve will show off some of Rust's history, with all of the decisions and changes that were made along the way.

ACM DL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2960081
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2959689.2960081

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Ok, so I second talk of the day, as I mentioned before, steve klabnik up.

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Talking about the history of rust, so without further ado.

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Hi everybody I'm steve. Thank you so much for having me here. This is definitely.

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Honor and I'm extremely excited to give this talk, I work on the rest project at.

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Mozilla, but before that I was involved in rust as an open source capacity.

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I actually wrote the first community tutorial like the first tutorial for us.

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Outside of mozilla like three years ago and eventually turned that into now, it.

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Is my job to write the tutorials for us, so I work on all the documentation, but.

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One thing that is very very interesting about rust is because of mozilla's open.

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Source dna rust is a programming language. They had an extremely long.

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Period of development in public before it was really ready to be used by a.

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Industry and so that history is actually very long, and I wanted to give you some.

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Of this backstory to sort of summarize the history of breast development, so.

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That we can remember it, you know in five years, once we've had two days rest and.

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So this is a talk largely about trust history. So a just a brief bit about the language itself.

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Russell, a programming language we have been developing it for.

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I like to say almost 10 years that will talk about . ization, but basically.

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Basically, a eight and a half 10 years we had our one ., no release on may of.

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Last year, so it's been about a year since one point out and one point I was.

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The part where stuff sort of stopped changing, and so I want to talk about.

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That pre . the the one year since one point out and a little teeny bit about.

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Rest future, I'm not going to talk a whole lot more about rust itself.

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First, I want to discuss like why you should care about the history, even if.

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You don't you know, know that much about the language. So let's talk about stories.

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So this is like a story of rust. Stories need to have some kind of narrative to.

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Sort of drive them forward, and so I'm I particularly like to think of this kind.

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Of history of being divided into epics so and an epic you know, is a little bit.

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Of a fuzzy kind of term, because it's not necessarily about this date till this.

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Date, it's about what is the predominant sort of like theory at the time or what is.

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The predominant paradigm that is going on at this particular time period and so.

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As things goes on and times change, we sort of move into a different epic, and so r us has had four sort of epochs.

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In its story so far and we're kind of just entering a new one like two or.

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Three weeks into the for the next one, and so I I sort of gave these names to.

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Kind of help, because saying dates all the time is kind of you know annoying so.

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2006 2010 are the personal years, 2010 2, 2012 or the grading years. Twenty.

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Twelve to fourteen is the type system years and then there was the release.

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Year from 2015 till may of this year, and so now I'm calling this new era the.

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Production year we'll see if in a year or two from now, that's like a dumb name.

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You can't necessarily predict the future, but I think that this is what is going.

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To sort of dominate rust in the near future, so moving between epics.

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This is a quote: I'm sorry, this is kind of small. What is interesting about my.

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Presentation is it actually generated by the rust documentation tool, which is.

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Really cool, but it also means that sometimes the text is a little tiny.

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uh Well, um this quote says it took a long time to figure out how r us ought.

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To work, this is nico maracas, one of the core team members of rust, and so the reason.

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That rust had this sort of complicated history or these four different periods.

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Is because we always sort of knew what we wanted rust to be, but we didn't know.

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How to make it what we wanted it to be, and so it was this, like research, development effort to sort of figure out.

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How to go and achieve our goals and that changed significantly.

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Over history, so I like to call this empirical iteration. So if you look at.

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Rust on this on, like a feature basis like what features of the language have.

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Its pretty much being these four different languages over these four.

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Different time periods, but if you look at our mission statement.

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It has always been the same since the beginning, and so that sort of happens.

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Because of this understanding and research that we did about how to.

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Achieve our goals- and you know, whenever you learn new things, you should revise.

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What you're doing right that's sort of a core scientific principle. However, the.

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Eight years that led up to the release of one point out is also an extremely.

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Long period of time, so we have a lot of ground to cover and we learned a lot.

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Over this history, so another aspect of this iteration, like I make reference to empiricism so like.

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How are we empirical about developing rest on the first thing that we did was.

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To rewrite the rest compiler in rust itself, the original of us compiler was.

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Written no camel talk about that in a minute, but we bootstrapped relatively early and we.

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Thought this was important to sort of test out the language itself. However, one.

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Danger with this approach is that you might end up developing a programming.

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Language, that's really good at building compilers. Since that's your main, you.

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Know thing you're doing with it. So a is an effort to not do that and also to sort of prove it out a in worth.

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To mozilla, at the same time, we also started the servo project, which is a.

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Rewrite of gecko the rendering engine that drives firefox, so we sort of had.

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These two different large code bases to work with rust on.

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And while you know it's not totally like the projects are completely separate, a.

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Lot of people that contribute to one also contribute to the other a little bit. There's a number of people who work pretty much only on the language itself.

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And a number of people that work pretty much only on servo.

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And so it even you know, michelle is a large enough organization that these.

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Groups, we are kind of like relatively separate, and so it's kind of like.

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Working with different teams are working with this entire separate project, and so.

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What would happen was we would on the rest team. We would develop some kind of.

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New feature- and we put it in the language and then servo would start.

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Using it- and they would tell us like oh this feature- works really well for this.

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Feature doesn't work really well or here's our tweaks and if the project, if the particular feature was good, we.

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Would keep it and it was bad. We would throw it out or revise it in some way, and so this process kind of back and forth turned and turned and turned and.

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Turned- and we just did this for a really long time to sort of figure out- you know.

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It's kind of like having a really sharp stone and just running water over it.

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Until everything is smooth, sometimes the stone goes away entirely need to get a new stone.

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So I like say that rust has lost more features than many languages even had in.

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The first place like, if you pick a random . and rest history, it seems like a completely and.

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Totally different language, it's also important before rust, came out a lot of people look to this process.

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From the outside and said, clearly, the rest team has no idea what they're doing.

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They keep trying things out and throw them away, and so it's not about having an identity crisis.

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It's again it's about research like this is fundamentally a research project and.

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So we've always had this goal and you know that's important.

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Ok, so to review for epics personal years.

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Great in years type system years and the release year.

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Now I'm going to get into some history from each of these different time.

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Periods so the personal years.

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These are some quotes from the very first time that great whore, the original.

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Inventor of rust announced the project to the world.

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So I have been writing a compiled concurrent, safe systems, programming.

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Language for the past four and a half years, we do not know what exactly will come of it. Many older languages are actually.

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Better than newer languages- and we keep forgetting already learned lessons and.

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He described dressed as technology from the past come to save the future from.

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Itself that was an awesome, excellent sentence, and so this is sort of like what I mean.

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By we've always had the same goal, you will find almost the exact same language used to describe rest today.

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That first sentence compiled concurrent safe systems, programming, language.

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If you go to rust line . or today, you will find a rusted systems, programming.

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Language that is focused on safety, speed and concurrency. So, like the safety.

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Systems stuff was and concurrency you're all you know there.

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It's the same language, so it's especially interesting that it was.

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Completely different- and so I call these the personal years because again this.

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Was great and had announced like he was developing this in his spare time.

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So here's some old syntax- I have a bunch of slides with syntax that doesn't exist.

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Anymore, just like show you a little bit of how the language has changed, and so this was.

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The basically the first rest code that was ever shown to the world like outside.

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Of graton, so we have a log key word that can print things to the screen.

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We still have this like fn, a style like function declaration, but the types are.

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Before the variables kind of like see, so we have two integers returns. Another.

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Integer, isn't if you notice red x, + ret. Why.

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Originally grade and had a rule that key words could not be longer than five.

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Characters maximum so early rust was extremely tourists, and that was one of.

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The things that in some instances, we have slowly relaxed but in some.

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Instances we've not so, for example, we still have ffn, but brett is now return.

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Because that makes sense.

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In the early development, this was a really good thing, but you know like.

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Different people have different opinions, rust used to have explicit object.

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Orientation, so we declare an object with the object keyword because again it's to.

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Look still needs to be short and has one instance variable and integer.

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I that you know the state, and so we have like a member functions to increment and.

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Return, the value of that state and then down here in maine, we create a new.

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Counter and started off at 10, you notice the auto key words you type inference so.

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Early rust still had a lot of type inference and we can call increments and then.

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Print out you know get so rust is not actually, strictly speaking, have object.

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Oriented stuff anymore, well, it kind of does like I I like to see the rest does not have 0, because I.

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Don't think that it satisfies either of the two sort of major forms of <month>.

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October </month>, in my opinion, so we definitely do not have alan kaizo, oh and.

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We don't really have java zoe there, so rust might have 0, depending on your.

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Opinion of what the definition of hopi like even is what we had explicitly.

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Before here's a function that uh with generics so early rest had generics, it use the.

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Square brackets to indicate type parameters, so this function swap takes.

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One type parameter t and a tuple of two teas and returns a tuple of 2 t's by.

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Swapping their inner values, because the underscore one and underscore 0 or the.

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Indexing syntax to access the elements of the tuple, and so we can make a string.

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Pair and an integer pair and swap them by you, know explicitly passing in these.

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Type parameters- and so this was kind of the you know generics back then.

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One of the things that great and said that I think is, is really important.

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Because sometimes be taken out of context is the semantics. Is the.

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Interesting part, the syntax is really about the last concern, and I think that when you're.

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Researching a language and you're figuring it out.

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This is really really important. There's sort of this law in the the high school.

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Community, which I think that it swaddlers law, but I cannot remember the.

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Name of top of my head, but basically it says like the further you go down this.

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List, the more people will argue about it and it's semantics: syntax, lexical, syntax.

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Lexical syntax of comments, and so people get really really really like hung up on.

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Syntax when they look at a language, but if your language, designer.

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uh I think that, while you're figuring your language out, you should not worry.

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About syntax, it is, however, important later so. For example, once we had gotten rust to the.

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State where we liked our semantics, we did an intense evaluation of all of our syntax to make it like acceptable to people. So sometimes we'll put this quote and be.

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Like the rest, designers, don't care about some tax at all and, like that's not.

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Really true, we didn't care before and we care very much now because times change, but so.

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There was this also meant that, because rust is written and rust,.

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When you're changing the syntax of the language on a daily basis in the project.

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That is written inside of it. You accumulate technical debt and we'll talk about that later.

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Here are some other descriptions that great and gave of the rest language back.

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Then so memory safety, no wild pointers, the type state system.

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No null pointers. This was a plt research thing called type state that we had in.

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Rust and we ended up actually removing because it was not actually useful. But.

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It was pitched is like one of the original reasons to use rust was like.

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Finally, a language that implemented type state, mutability control immutable by.

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Default side effect control, pure by default.

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Rust does not have the concept of purity at all anymore.

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You can break the rules, but you have to authorize where and how, in a standard.

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Way, that's integrated the language and easy to audit.

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This is still completely true today and retains its original form, which is the.

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Unsafe keyword so in a systems, programming, language.

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You do not have the luxury of being able to tell your users that they have to do.

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Something your way or you don't have the luxury of pretending that the machine is.

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Not what the machine actually is, so we have the gun safety word that allows you.

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To sort of break out of the rules that we have constructed because, like.

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Fundamentally, the machine definitely is not immutable by default and the machine.

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You know definitely has no pointers, and you know things like this.

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Well, you know, depending on your perspective, and so you know this is.

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Really really important to the language multi-paradigm. Definitely not everything.

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Is an object and different abstractions for different problems, trade-offs.

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Between control, expression, clarity and brevity, and this kind of relates to what I was just talking about, like you can't say,.

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Everything needs to be fully objects because, like what, if it doesn't, you know.

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It just depends, I've been, I have a little hobby operating system project were working on.

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In rust and I just converted my interrupt table from assembly to like.

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Actual rest code- and I appreciated this- you know in that moment because you need.

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These explicit bits need to be set and put it exactly this location in memory.

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And, like you know, your cpu does not care if you're you know, but everything needs.

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To be an object doesn't happen so at this point.

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uh You know, after four years of personal development of great an estimated that.

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About ninety percent of the language features were working in rough form.

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Again. Remember: there's like five years of history after this time, .. Seventy.

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Percent of the runtime is working and it's a thirty-eight thousand line of.

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Code o camel compiler, and so actually this original . actually thinks looks.

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Extremely similar to what go is today other than you know now go is written.

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And go, but we sort of had this runtime this. This edition of rust actually had a.

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Garbage collector, because we assumed that you need a garbage collector for.

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Memory safety- I have some upcoming code to show you channels, which I think is happening soon.

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But channels were in the language because we thought you needed them to to.

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Need them to be in the language have to be safe.

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I'm skipping ahead so after this sort of what I call a personal years, the next.

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Year's and the ones that have at least slide on our the great in years and so.

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Rust was now adopted by mozilla so again, this servo project. Fundamentally, why.

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Mozilla cares about rust is that firefox is written about four and a half million.

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Lines of c++ code. And if you look at the extreme security vulnerabilities and.

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Firefox, like the ones that say, if you go to the wrong web page, they run arbitrary.

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Code on your machine kind of like extreme security vulnerabilities about.

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Fifty percent of them boil down to the fact that c++ is a very sharp tool and.

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Even when you have you know, incredibly distinguished engineers have been.

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Working you know even on the same project, for over a decade.

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Humans are still fundamentally fallible, and so you make a mistake and then you.

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Pay the costs so part of why mozilla's interested in rust is. Can we eliminate those human mistakes through a.

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Compiler, like compilers, never sleep, compilers, don't get tired compilers. Always hopefully you know. Do the right.

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Thing obviously, compilers also have bugs, so that statement is like kind of false.

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In some sense, but you know, the idea is to reduce these kinds of problems and so.

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uh So rusted and been adopted by mozilla grading was a mozilla employee and so.

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Basically, this was his personal project that got brought into missoula proper and grain was a benevolent benevolent dictator for life style figure in the.

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Development of rest during this time .. So there was this particularly steady.

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Rate of improvement and change the language and the team would slowly grow.

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So originally there are only great and one or two other employees on rust and.

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Then slowly, as you know, the project grew mozilla allocated more people start.

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Working on rust and so development accelerated when you go from one.

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Developer to for developers, you know you get a lot more done.

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Obviously not four times but, like you know, it helps.

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So a that time period was also not super, particularly interesting, which is why.

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I'll have one slide on it because it was like we did some work and slowly work.

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Through a lot of issues, but as the team grew one of the things that happened was.

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We brought more people had more experience with more advanced type.

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Systems so like people that had phd's in type systems, research and so naturally,.

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The language grew a better and better type system and one side effect of this.

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That I alluded to earlier was that, as the type system grew more and more stuff,.

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Moved out of the language proper and into libraries, so, as I mentioned for.

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Example, we thought that we needed a garbage collector.

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I'm deal with memory safety, it turns out. We can do that entirely through the type.

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System and eliminate the gc entirely.

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We thought that channels needed to be in the language in order to be safe.

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It turns out that that's not actually true, you can make channel safe through.

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The type system and then move them into the library so rust, sort of as a package.

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To the end user, it didn't really lose. A lot of features like rust still has.

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Channels today, but the difference is, is that because they're in libraries other.

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People can provide alternative implementations, so we only have a multiple producer single consumer channel in the standard.

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Library, if you need a multiple producer, multiple consumer channel, you can.

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Install a package and get this sort of alternate implementation, and that's one.

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Of the really nice things about this particular aspect of the design is that.

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The more you move out of the language, the less the compiler needs to express.

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Expressly support these kind of things, which is which is pretty cool.

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The other thing that happens the sort of marks this transition for me from the.

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Great new years to the type system years was the grade and step down from the.

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Project itself, he is still kind of around a little bit, but you know after you work on something.

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For years and years and years you know you eventually want to do something else.

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With your life, and now that it's sort of head like picked up steam and other.

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People were there to carry the project on. He decided that what was best for him personally was to stop working on rust.

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And kind of take some time off and and get away from things, and so I think this.

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Is very interesting for a number of reasons. um The first thing is is that while grading was sort of this benevolent.

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Dictator and he would absolutely hate that term, which is kind of the great guy.

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He is, it also means in some way his influence has grown, because, when great does show.

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Up in a discussion were like whoa, we haven't heard from grading in a year and now here he is weighing in.

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So like, ironically, by leaving, he sort of gained a little bit more sort of social.

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Power but another really, I think, awesome aspect of this like I, I grading is a.

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Wonderful person, and so I'm kind of sad that he's not around, but at the same time I'm also.

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Glad that he's not around, because what this means is, we don't have our sort of.

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Original person around to tell us what to do.

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Which means that no one has that particular level of authority, and so I.

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Was previously involved heavily in the ruby and rails communities before I sort.

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Of moved in to rest, and both ruby and rails still have their original creator.

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Around sort of steering the ship and mats and th are also very capable people.

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But I sort of think I strongly prefer this situation, where we have a very.

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Distributed leadership, and that means that things get discussed a lot more.

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There's no like one person decreasing by fee at like this, is what's happening.

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Because I wrote this thing originally, so you all just have to deal with it and so.

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That's a very interesting I'm sort of aspect as well so because I don't have a.

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Slide on this later, so what eventually happened? Was we developed a core team which I'm a member of which started off at six people and now is nine people, but.

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We also have this like federated governance structure, where each area of.

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The project has sort of its own team that manages what goes on and the core.

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Teams role is really to ensure coherency across the project and sort of to make.

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Sure the cross-cutting curtain concerns or develop our own dealt with.

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So each of these sub teams has one core team member on it.

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Whose job is to kind of like escalate? You know if they see that, like? Oh, this.

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Thing might affect the other part. I need to make sure and go and notify this other team of the work that we're doing so really we went from like one person in charge like 30 or 40 people.

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Like loosely in charge, which is been wonderful,.

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Ok, so I was talking a lot about channels being rude for the language. I have some.

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Syntax to kind of show you the way that it used to be in the way that it is now.

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So here was a function called receive that took in a task, names task and a.

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Channel that was a you know, has a t-type parameter, name chan, and so in this.

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Particular case task and chan are keywords of the language actually knew.

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About and could reason and understand when compiling to verify that things.

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Were safe if you were to write that sort of a similar thing today,.

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It would look more like this, so we now have these use statements bringing in.

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Different parts of the standard library- and then we have this sender and.

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Receiver and a channel is just a tuple of a sender and a receiver, so this is.

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Kind of now we have to find a structure to put these things in and package them.

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Up and they're like no longer you know a particular keyword, so we got a little bit more verbose. But again this.

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Allows us to sort of swap out the you know, implementations for different ones,.

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If you need them so there's like an increase in power.

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Another great case, study example and something that rust kind of originally.

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Got a little famous for that we abandoned was pointers, so rust used to.

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Have between who you could ask for like 20, different kinds of pointers and.

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They were, there really were only three ish kind of its it's complicated. The.

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Three, where the big ones, and uh so we had this syntax.

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Let x equals at five, and that was a garbage collected, . er back when we had.

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The gc originally once we sort of got rid of the garbage collector we put in like a reference.

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Counter this became a reference counting pointer that sort of had a to do deal.

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With cycles, and then that never happened, because we actually killed the feature.

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Entirely before we bothered implementing the cycle collection.

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Let y equals till the five was what was called a unique . at the time, and this.

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Was an ra style, you would allocate a value and then we would go out of scope.

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It would be deallocated pointer and then let z equals ampersand. Five.

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This was called a borrowed pointer and it was more like a pointer in see, but.

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With this additional type, checking that rest does so just a reference to a value.

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Of some kind, so these things are all sort of in the language still today, but now they kind.

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Of look like this, so the gc pointer is gone entirely.

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We do have a reference counted type, actually, two of them at this point.

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And now this unique pointer is now called a box which is a you know, common.

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Term for putting an object on the heap and then we call the bar pointers.

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References and they still sort of function, the same kind of way, but and so.

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They still have some tax in language, but the the tilde pointers.

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Don't exist but have a standard library.

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Then one thing that happens- and this is a fun thing about doing sort of .

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Ization and dealing with histories is the type system years also had some.

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Really great improvements to the language that were not related to the type system. Oh well, names are hard right as a classic computer science issue and one.

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Of the things that we invest in heavily early on was this thing called cargo and.

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Creates ., I oh so. Cargo is like a combination, build tools, / package.

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Management system and create audio is an online repository of open source code.

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That people are able to share, and so when you start a new rest project, you.

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Will often do cargo new food begin to get a binary instead of a library change.

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In the directory- and we actually generate a hello world program for you,.

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So that you don't even need to type it out yourself, and so when you type cargo run, it will compile your project and then actually.

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Run and executable and printed out, but this is the most basic example, the real.

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Power of cargo comes in when you start having dependencies and also a. I guess.

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Before getting dependencies, I was lied about like what this does under the hood. So if you pass v, you.

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Get the verbose output and so a regular old car go build. You can still see this.

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Compiling fool line, but this actually is running this gigantic commands.

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uh You know under the hood this this sort of reminds me of like installing.

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Gentoo or something or like you know, using a make, build build system. You get this scroll by of all these things, but one thing that's also really important.

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It's not just about hiding all this info about what is going on here.

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It's also about enabling common patterns. So if you pass release you get a.

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Release build instead of a regular, build and what's interesting about this.

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I is if you look on the line right below running rusty, there's a gee there and.

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If you look below the running recipe, there's a co-op level, three.

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So like by default, you get debugging symbols automatically. When you do a.

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Debug build and you don't get debugging symbols and you get the you know. High.

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Level of optimization of a release build- and this is just out of the box.

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And so this is this, this kind of thing this is, of course, also configurable.

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Because sometimes you need release mode, so you have an acceptable performing.

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Thing we still want to bug me: symbols and whatever you can customize this, but.

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The important part is about enabling common patterns, because it enables.

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People who have not come from a compiled language to trivially sort of start.

A

Using language in a real way without having to dig into the details, so I know.

A

As well, I I learned see relatively early, but one of the reasons I got away from.

A

See in my life was having a deal and manage with all these compiler flags and.

A

Knowing what all this stuff was and like figuring all this out, and so it's a really really great thing- for accessibility to people that are new.

A

They can learn what these flags mean later.

A

They just need to know bill. Does a regular, build and build release? Is a.

A

Release build so it's very powerful.

A

Another thing is that there's this configuration file for cargo, so we use.

A

The tamil format to do this, because, basically, a all configuration files have.

A

Lots of downsides and tamil as a reasonable one that still has some.

A

Downsides but less than all the others, we sort of thought and also some of the good ones like. I is just not.

A

Standardized whatsoever, so everyone is a slightly different idea. What is anyway,.

A

So we have this metadata. That gives you the name of the package and a version.

A

Number and the authorship information which we pull from your get or material.

A

Or whatever, by default, so it is automatically in there, but an extremely.

A

Powerful feature is the ability to add dependencies, so here I'm going to add the time create at any version and the log great, and I.

A

Want a version is compatible with zero point two point: one: when I chain make.

A

This file, a when you add this to my configuration file.

A

The next time I type cargo build cargo knows how to go to create cio grab the.

A

Registry information and then download and compiled these dependencies.

A

But what's important is you'll notice that I only said anytime and log, but now.

A

I have log and lib c and g c and time and foo.

A

So as it turns out that both the time and log creates depend on lipsy and so.

A

Cargo is able to figure out a version that was compatible with both of them.

A

I'm and download all the dependencies, and so it not only knows how to grab the.

A

Dependencies I've told about the dependencies of those dependencies and.

A

This is an extremely powerful feature that is just really really nice and.

A

Convenience, a lot of systems languages are sort of before this kind of thing.

A

Was regular when I show this to like ruby programmers like yeah, we do this.

A

Every day is called butler, but when you come from the system's world, like the.

A

This is the thing that has not existed, and so it's really really really.

A

Powerful for enabling code reuse across an ecosystem and as that ecosystem is.

A

Developed there's a number of extremely interesting things that have come out of it. So as an example, I'm working on my little operating system and rust.

A

There actually is a package called x86 that gives me pre-wrapped on x86.

A

Platform, specifically, you need assembly instructions to manage things like the.

A

Idt and the gt, and so there is a package that you can install that already has.

A

Those assembly functions written out for you and wrapped up and rest functions so.

A

You can install and use the package to manage your interrupt table if you're writing the thing and rust, which is like the idea of using open source packages.

A

To help you build, your operating system is just something is extremely exciting.

A

To me, anyway,.

A

Ok, so, and as part of this I mentioned like rubios say this part is normal as.

A

Rest community grew during this time period, they're sort of three camps that people came from x, equals plus users accepting.

A

Language users and x, functional programmers and in some ways rest is a.

A

Combination of these three things. But I like to say that all three of these.

A

Groups bring something to the table over us, but they also get something out of it.

A

So the c and c++ programmers or the other people from the system, z, kind of.

A

Camp, what they bring to rust is this assurance that rust will be good for.

A

Low-Level use cases because they require systems stuff. So you know they're able.

A

To point out, like hey this feature, actually, you know is not particularly.

A

Great for low-level users, or we need this additional feature.

A

You know to be added for little use cases and what they get out of rust is a.

A

Language with a really strong type system and a package manager, and all these other.

A

Kinds of features built on top of you know the in a way the kind of same.

A

Semantics that are used to scripting language users, and I would have called.

A

Myself being from this camp personally, because I wasn't, as I said, involved in.

A

Ruby before rust, what we bring to the table to rust is a an appreciation for things like user.

A

Interface and experience we are really used to and especially rubios everything being extremely.

A

Convenient and what we see, something that getting complex we like wrap it up.

A

And try to make a convenient again, so the idea of cargo came directly from the ruby and npm. You know javascript.

A

Kind of package manager systems- and we brought our our expertise there to help.

A

Make that happen when we originally pitch cargo, the x c++ crowd was like you.

A

Can use those cute little tools if you want to, but I'll stick with my make.

A

Files thanks and then for five months later they were like. Why did I ever still want to write.

A

Make files so that was kind of what we like brought to the table and what we.

A

Got out of rust was a language that was extremely low level and performance.

A

So you know, ruby is not the fastest language in the world, but that's also.

A

Not what we use ruby, but sometimes you need things to go fast, and so you know.

A

Having the ability to drop down to a lower level is extremely interesting and.

A

For a variety of reasons, a lot of existing scripting language users have.

A

Already rejected see your c++ either because they looked at it and did not.

A

Like it or because they tried and failed and so we're seeing a lot of people where rest is their first ever low-level.

A

Programming language and that's extremely exciting to me to get more.

A

People into low-level programming and then finally x, functional programmers.

A

What these people bring to the table is that type systems, knowledge and all this.

A

Kind of stuff and what they get out of rust sorts sort of similar description.

A

Language people, where you know this kind of feels like an ml, but it runs more.

A

Like see kind of thing, and so that's extremely exciting, so all three of these groups have made rest.

A

What it is today, part of that is the rfc process.

A

So in march of 2014 again we have this federated governance structure so.

A

There's no one person to be able to decree what is going on, and so we actually have a nrc.

A

Process for that it was largely inspired by pythons pep process and it's for.

A

Introducing significant language changes there have been 1600 of these submitted.

A

Since march of 2014 and we've accepted 243 of them, they're still, there are 69 more that are under.

A

Active discussion right now, and so even the core team has to go through this process.

A

Nobody is allowed to make big changes to rest without discussing in front of.

A

People and this process has been wonderful first of all in order to actually get feedback on opinions. So the number of.

A

Times where we, as the core team, have been like, we want to make this change, we talked about it and then we propose it were like it's great and then people bring their expertise into the thread, and then we go.

A

Oh, we were completely wrong. Actually, you were totally right and it's like a very.

A

Collaborative interesting process that has only made rust get way better.

A

Ok, so a a brief thing about rust will stop in history.

A

Quickly to show you, I'm gonna show you a little bit about rust code and the kinds of problems that resolves. So this is ruby code. We have an array named v. We.

A

Push a string called hello to it. We make a reference to the first element of this, and then we push a new thing.

A

Onto the array- and we print out like what is the first element.

A

So this kind of works in ruby, because that doesn't actually make a real.

A

Reference, it makes a copy and because everything is behind a pointer and.

A

Everything is garbage collected, these are all able to be changed by the.

A

Runtime, like what location the data is able to be modified, so this totally.

A

Works in ruby is like not invalid code, but if you translate it to c++ with a.

A

Vector of strings, and then you push hello on to that vector.

A

You make it an actual reference to the zeroth element of the array, and then you.

A

Push on to the vector and print out x,.

A

What happens well with w all and w air g + + will not complain about this.

A

Code whatsoever, it is totally fine, but you run it and you get a sec fault.

A

And so the reason this happens, if you look at the documentation for pushback.

A

It says if the new size is greater than capacity than all iterators and.

A

References are invalidated, and it's like it's great that that's in the.

A

Documentation but like I'm, not necessarily remembering all of the.

A

Details of all the functions that I call when I'm doing this kind of thing.

A

I'm and this example is relatively trivial and yes, real c++ programmers.

A

Would not necessarily make this kind of mistake, but you can't show real examples.

A

On slides, so there's just a fundamental tension there.

A

We have empirical evidence that, no matter how good you are sharp languages.

A

Still end up introducing these kinds of problems and rest is not free of those.

A

Problems: it's just aiming to eliminate the vast vast majority of these kinds of.

A

Problems so, in a specific example, here is the rest code that does this.

A

You know we have a vector we push on to it. We make a reference we push on to it.

A

And we printed out you notice. This is kind of a weird like mixture of that ruby code. It's like.

A

Weirdly, it's more like the ruby than it is like the c++. But when you try to.

A

Compile this and rust you get a compile-time error.

A

Hey you cannot borrow v is mutable because it's also borrowed is immutable.

A

When you make that reference, rust knows that, if you put something on to it, would.

A

Be invalidated, so it actually gives you of this error specifically and points.

A

Out like when you made the reference, that's where this thing went wrong, so you can't do the push while you still have it and it ends when the function is gone. If you were trying to do other.

A

Things: we've provided compile-time errors for these kinds of problems and.

A

This is sort of the core value proposition of rest is that you get the.

A

Exact same code as you would from c or c++, but you get this stuff checked in a.

A

Way that you know you don't have to remember the details of this kind of.

A

Stuff another brief thing about rusted a concurrency, so I'm gonna show you some.

A

Like increasingly verbose examples and then some simpler ones.

A

So this uh spins up 10 different threads, so we mapped from the range of 0 to 10 and.

A

Then, in each element of that we spawn a new thread and print hello world and.

A

Then we collect up these the guards that come back. So when you spawn a new thread.

A

You could handle beck and call join the handle, but it also gets called whenever.

A

The value would go out of scope, so this will end up hitting the end of the scope.

A

Of main and then pausing until all the thread guards go out of the way and then.

A

You know you get a hello world, so this is kind of a little verbose, but it's also just printing hello world yeah. So here is a slightly more complicated example involving mutable.

A

State across threads, and so in this case we have an atomically reference, ,.

A

Pointer with a mutex inside and that holds a vector of numbers, and then we.

A

Need to make a new vector for the handles loop through three times.

A

Increment the reference count using the clone method spin up the new thread.

A

Inside that new thread call lock to unwrap the mutex, then get that value.

A

Back and then we can insert that particular part of the array print out.

A

What it is a push that handle from the thread onto the global list of handles.

A

And then here I decided to explicitly write out the joint rather than just let.

A

It go out of scope, so this is like a lot of complexity, but the reason this is a.

A

Lot of complexity is because you have complete control over all of the details.

A

And rust is not trying to hide those details from you.

A

So, for example, maybe a mutex is not the synchronization primitive. You wanted to.

A

Use here maybe you would prefer to use something like a read/write lock.

A

So you have the ability to sort of change that out from underneath, because.

A

This is kind of exposed to you, but even then this is like a little a little too verbose. But, as I mentioned earlier,.

A

Because we have this package ecosystem, we can actually do much better.

A

So the crossbeam crate provides the ability to specifically create threads.

A

That will join before their parent function terminates and not only does.

A

This mean we get this significantly simpler code example.

A

So in this example, we have this cross beam scope, function that gives us this.

A

Scope what kind of object! And then we call spawn on that, and so it knows that all.

A

These things will join before the overall scope goes out of scope and.

A

Because we know that will join, we don't need to do the mutex and the reference counting stuff. We can actually.

A

Take mutable pointers so this for I & ampersand mute numbers means that every iteration is immutable.

A

Pointer to that particular element of the array and then we're actually able.

A

To increment it directly without having any synchronization whatsoever, because.

A

The type system is able to say: okay, you have a disjoint pointers to each element.

A

Of this array- and I know the parent stack frame is going to be valid.

A

By the time this thread is over, so it's totally fine and safe.

A

So we're able to through the type system, eliminate actual synchronization.

A

Primitives, that would be necessary if you did not have them. So that's really.

A

Really cool and it's also easier to use.

A

So that's nice! Ok enough about that code.

A

I want to talk about the next time ., which is the release year, so we put out.

A

Rest one point out: . out alpha on friday: genuine I've 2015 and the first beta on.

A

Februari 16, we sort of said we don't know how many betas we're going to have.

A

To eventually finish up and one point out, actually ended up happening on a 15.

A

2015, and so from that time period until shortly after the release.

A

You know it was like there's been eight years of rust, being developed by.

A

Changing every day- and I like the language, but I can never use it because it's changing at one point out. We said it will still change, but only in.

A

Backwards compatible ways. So, no longer do you need to rewrite your library, five.

A

Times a week in order to keep current with rust master, and that is also enable.

A

A lot of people to start actually building real and larger things. On top.

A

Of the language, so during this particular time . we are still.

A

Continuing to push the boundaries of what is possible with the language, and I.

A

What for for particular aspects of this, so it's about the ecosystem, the tooling.

A

The stability in the community, I think that one area- and this is one of the reasons interesting to be researching at mozilla like to be a researcher at mozilla- is that when you're in academia.

A

You're not necessarily concerned about helping industry, but when you're in this.

A

Weird research, development, part of the organization that in industry you.

A

Eventually have to like productize your research, and it's not like, I could mean.

A

Never productize research, obviously, but I think it's one of the area's. Why? Like.

A

Plt has not escaped into the industry. More is because there has never been an.

A

Organization, that's willing to pay for all of the extra work.

A

It's not about just the plt, because language adoption is more than this.

A

Language has good features if that was true, the language ecosystem would work very differently.

A

There's also all this extra stuff around the language there's also work that you.

A

Have to do if you want your language to be adopted in the industry, and it's just.

A

As much problem as the actual like plt dev, I'm itself, so we're also really.

A

Working on innovating, with rust in a number of different axes, so the first is.

A

This ecosystem- I told you about car, goes in cargo and crystalline earlier. This is enabled.

A

Super easy sharing of code, and so we have as a last night over 5,000 packages.

A

Now, in this you know year since we've had rest one point out, so there's a lot.

A

Of activity, my partner actually works at 10pm, and so she sees this number and like laughs,.

A

Because they're pushing you know like millions of packages every day but we'll.

A

Get there 1410 total contributors to rest, see.

A

So that is a really large number for a programming language and that's just the.

A

Language itself, not the other stuff related to and other things and like.

A

Most common contribution graphs: this is a long tale, so it's not like. We have.

A

1400 people who are working on this every day, a significant number of them have only ever had one commit but, like you know,.

A

It's still impressive that we've managed to pull these many people in and we're.

A

Still looking to pull it even more people, we more contribution from a lot of people, sort of three of the large areas where.

A

Arrests or being used as game development operating system stuff.

A

Web development there's a whole bunch of other things as well, but these were some.

A

Of the earliest kind of micro eco system, so there's a whole miniature community.

A

Within the rest, community of game developers were developing their own ecosystems of packages to do that and os people and web stuff.

A

It's interesting chris, I always actually implemented in rust itself. So it's a.

A

Rush back end with an ember jess front end and it uses like 30 megabytes of.

A

Memory residents, basically, which, like you, can barely spin up a ruby process in.

A

25 megabytes of memory and the new load rails and using like 300-350. So that was.

A

Something that was extremely shocking to me when I went from my old web stuff to.

A

Rest web dev we've been innovating on tooling, so cargo was extremely. You know.

A

There's a reason I keep bringing it up because it is wonderful. We are working.

A

On this tool called rest formats, which is one of the best things that the goal.

A

Language ever introduced to people.

A

Obviously it was not the first language to do so, but it's one of the first that made people realize this was a really wonderful idea to stop arguing about.

A

Syntax and structure, and just like make it happen.

A

I like to joke that the ruby world doesn't have an actual ruby format. We.

A

Just like do it ourselves, because people get really mad if you use for spaces.

A

Versus two spaces, and don't even mention tabs, um so we would just like do that ourselves, basically by introducing a.

A

Tool that did it is just way better like. Why do I have to do this manually and so.

A

It's taking us a little longer to put this together because uh it's it reaches.

A

In the compiler internals and why the language is stable, the compiler.

A

Internals are not as stable, so it's taken us a while, but it is coming very soon. You can use it today, but it is not like fully done.

A

Ide integration- I put pretty okay because we're like we're doing pretty.

A

Solid for a young language, but there's still lots of work to do specifically, it has been great timing. Around microsoft has made visual studio.

A

Significantly more open and being able to work with like gb stuff, and so that's.

A

Been really wonderful and windows and a number of open source editors have.

A

Plugins, I personally use them and there's a you know, plug-in to do great stuff with that.

A

So all that stuff is coming along and its really really important. The number.

A

One response to hear from like people at that, don't currently is rust or why they.

A

Would like to stop not use rest yet is because they're like I need my id, and I.

A

Need my id work that way, so it's extremely important for adoption to get.

A

This right, we do not have a rest fix tool, so go. Has this tool called go fix.

A

That will let you upgrade between versions.

A

I think that is less used today, although maybe that's not true, but I know it was.

A

Very important before they had their one point out, but we don't have this tool.

A

And that is because one of the things that we've been doing a another like.

A

Innovative area is release engineering, so we have the stability policy, and that means that after rest, one . o.

A

Everything needs to be backwards compatible unless we find sound. This.

A

Errors in the type system, or something catastrophic like that, we have not yet.

A

We've had minor ones of those very, very minor, and so we put out a new one, . x,.

A

Release every six weeks which, for a programming language, is an extremely.

A

Aggressive really schedule many languages go with one release a year. We.

A

Have released every six weeks, the most recent one was last week actually, but because we focus on.

A

Compatibility, it means that you as a rest developer when a new rest comes out. You upgrade.

A

Your compiler and all your stuff still works like there's, not this sort of big.

A

Change, I lived through the ruby, 1.8 1.9 transition and it was very, very tough.

A

For all of us, the python ecosystem is still dealing with the python to python. 3 move like.

A

Five or seven years later, breaking backwards, compatibility is, is a really really bad thing for your users.

A

And stability is really really hard.

A

There are some things about life, trust that I would love to change, but I love.

A

My users more, and so it is unfortunately you'll- never have a perfect programming language and.

A

Continually breaking backwards compatibility in order to try to achieve that. Personal language is just not good for your actual users who don't.

A

Necessarily care that this is not perfect; they just want to like not have.

A

To rewrite all the code to upgrade things, and so additive change is really.

A

Ultimately, the way to go, I think, and we as an industry are sort of.

A

Learning this slowly, that we can't just rewrite the world constantly, even on the.

A

Two or three year cycle that we like 10 to rewrite the world in a lot of parts.

A

Of industry that just still means you can't build anything that lasts longer.

A

Than a couple years, because your foundation is gone, and so it's also.

A

Funny because, like as a user as a programming language designer.

A

I want to fix my sis mistakes and change things, but as a user of a programming.

A

Language and like please don't break my stuff, and so I feel both of these sides.

A

Constantly one thing that we do in order to ensure the stability is, we have this.

A

5000 packages that are open source, we have a tool called crater and, as part of the process like the week up until.

A

The release we actually run the new version of the compiler on every single package in the.

A

Ecosystem to see, if it still compiles, are not as like a massive regression.

A

Test and so we can actually guarantee that when a new release comes out.

A

None of your code will break because we've already tried it and it already works. The other thing about this six-week model is that it is a staggered on a.

A

Train model, so what happens is a master turns into beta and the last beta turns into the.

A

New release, so we also have a six week period.

A

Sort of like a release candidate of the next release in order to make sure that.

A

We haven't you missed out on a regressions and things like that, and so.

A

It's part of this train model that happens. Another thing, that's really wonderful about this process is there's not a lot.

A

Of pressure to put a feature in before it's ready.

A

So if you have a one-year release schedule and you come up with a really.

A

Great new feature in october or november, and you release in december.

A

There's an incredible amount of pressure to just ship it because you're going to.

A

Miss the train and wait a whole nother year before that feature comes out.

A

But this means you might not give the feature the level of care and attention that actually deserves, and so one of the weird things I think is that shipping faster, actually means.

A

That we have better quality because it's not a big deal to bump it back up to the.

A

Next release, like it's only coming six weeks from now, so we have a large amount of incentive to make sure that we get it right, because we really so often, which is very counterintuitive. But I think has been.

A

Extremely good for the language, so innovations in community we've had a code of conduct.

A

Since the very first commit in the rest depot- and this is a contentious sort of.

A

Area industry, where a lot of people are battling this out on various message.

A

Boards and twitter and whatever else, but we think this is extremely important.

A

That we treat people like humans like it's, it's true that software is.

A

Wonderful but like people matter more than software, so just like be reasonable.

A

Humans to other humans and don't be jerks.

A

It can be hard, but don't, and so one of the things that people continually.

A

Talked about because we have developed this culture of like please focus on.

A

Technical arguments, not personal arguments, you know please take some time off you clearly getting a little mad like trying.

A

To work with each other, like as adult humans, people continually reference.

A

How wonderful and welcoming the rest community is and like helping out new.

A

People there are a lot of language irc rooms where, if you join and ask a basic.

A

Question you get laughed at if you join the rest room and asked a very basic question. We will say: welcome.

A

Like thank you so much for using rest. So, and I know this is a fact, because when I.

A

Started using rest again, it was changing every day, and so I would come in and ask.

A

Really basic questions like once every month, because I was like everything.

A

Changed I can't figure out how it changed. Please help and in the main room.

A

We have about a thousand people in irc at all times, which is also pretty cool.

A

You can get help pretty much any time of the day and we also have split up in a.

A

Sub room so they're, specifically a beginner focused help room and a.

A

Compiler dev help room and a you know, tooling, help room and that kind of stuff.

A

um Ok, so, finally, I'm going to the end here.

A

The production year, so this is what I'm calling this next period of rest, is.

A

History, we sort of just seen once we had one point out that the funny part about like.

A

Releasing things is that people like okay, when's, one . happening, and so we.

A

Say all right: here's one point out and in like a week after one point out there.

A

Like what's the largest production, application running and rust, you have anything. That's like two hundred thousand lines of code and it's like. Did you really think that we could build a 200,000 line? The thing in like one week.

A

Like he just needs time right so there's this weird interesting lag time between when stability happens and when you actually.

A

See a deployed real things in industry, just based on the fact that, like riding.

A

A significant project takes a significant amount of time and you can only start at the time whenever things are. You know stable. So now we're just.

A

Seeing like an explosion of people using rest in production and it felt weird to.

A

Me at first like why did we go from one or two production users to 20 production.

A

Users in the last two months- and it's like oh, this is only just because people.

A

Are finally actually shipping the thing and announcing it took time to build so.

A

I'm going to set a couple of production users to sort of talk about how this has.

A

Worked so far, so on I'll start off with mozilla one of the things while we are trying to.

A

Rewrite ghetto: at the same time, we are really really like moving pieces of rust.

A

Code into firefox, because clearly we can't just like wholesale swap that out.

A

Yet- and we want to gain some of the benefits of rust in the existing code.

A

Base already so you know you can't just like just rewrite four and a half.

A

Million lines of code right, you have to do an incremental replacement strategy.

A

And so today, on a linux and mac os10 firefox 45 has some rust code inside of.

A

It so you may be using dress code already and do not even realize it.

A

And one really exciting feature that we just announced in this release: the rust.

A

Code, specifically, it's an mp4 parser has had over a billion executions with a.

A

Hundred percent correctness, so we do telemetry on firefox, you can opt into and report problems, and so we.

A

Specifically instrumented, like the rest code to see if it worked or not and has.

A

Been a hundred percent so fingers crossed that will last we'll see how.

A

Long, obviously, nothing is perfect. Firefox 47 is going to have it on windows and so.

A

Then we're going to see an even bigger, you know, like a billion sounds like a lot, but like not really.

A

It will be many many more and then around the time of firefox, 49 or firefox.

A

50 is the plan for android a firefox to start having dress code in it, and so it.

A

We only have a little bit now, but it's only going to grow. Dropbox recently went.

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Public that the core of their product is now written and rust.

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So there's this big article in wired, magazine about like dropbox, moves away from the amazon cloud.

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And it's really just they build their own data servers.

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Dropbox's core technologies go and they use it as a default for almost.

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Everything on the server, but as part of this project they basically wrote a new file system is the.

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Simplest way to explain it was obviously more complicated than that.

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And so they implemented that in rust, so they're go code actually calls in to.

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Rest code, or rather it's ipc right now, but eventually it's going to be in the.

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Language doesn't matter, you can go, read the post if you're interested in the.

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Details, but uh you know they pretty much like they actually put into production.

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In december, but only announced in april because they wanted that time period of.

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Like hey, did you notice how the universe didn't break like bleep? We ship new code.

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Like it has been working well for months, so that was kind of exciting.

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Tilda is a company that is well known for being part of the emperor jas.

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Community employees, the original member authors and one of those people you.

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Could catches on the rest of your team now and that's because skyline io is.

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Actually, one of our first production users they've been using rest for years now and it's a performance monitoring system.

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For rails apps, so you install their a skylight package into your rails application and it gives.

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You monitoring capabilities. They wrote that ruby gem in rust, which is cool and.

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So I was talking with you about this a couple weeks ago and he and I said like.

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So how stable is this been for you and he said well, we've had two crashes in the last four years and that's not to.

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Say that, like he's like what's significant about this, this number is that I can remember both of them like it's not like. We've had a number of.

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Problems and like you know, oh it's mostly good, but we sometimes have issues he's like no. I can literally count on one hand the number of times that we've had like a serious issue and.

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One of those two times our fault, not your fault, um so that's kind of interesting. We just started a page that we call the friends.

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Of rust and that's like organizations of using rest in production and so there's.

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A url there and is currently 22 organizations and we're adding more as people sort of.

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Announce like hey, I'm finally using rest at work cool, would love to have your logo on this page. One thing: that's not on that.

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Page that we want to add in the future is our universities.

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So there was a one university class and operating systems, development and rust.

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23 years ago that they did not do again and the this semester.

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There are two different university classes teaching rest. I had the pleasure.

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Of guest lecturing at the one at a university of pennsylvania, a couple.

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Weeks ago and the other one is a university of iowa somewhere in the.

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Midwest they're teaching rust so there and I was mit last week and they were talking.

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About how they're excited to start using rest in some capacity, some researchers.

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Are using it for their research, not a mighty like itself, but we're really.

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Excited to see university of take a rest as well, so hopefully I'll be able to say.

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22, you know 50 organizations and ten universities or whatever.

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This year, we'll see how it goes. Okay, I'm out of time.

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That is all uh I hope that I gave you a little bit of my love of the rest.

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Language- and I hope that if you try out rest, you love it too, but importantly, if.

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You don't that's totally fine with me. As I said, programming languages are good.

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For different reasons, so, like we try really hard not to be combative about.

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Other languages, and so I don't know where r us is necessarily super going in.

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The future, but if you're interested I would love to have some of you, come make.

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That future into reality, so thank you so much.

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Yeah, I think this is like coffee break now. Yeah totally, so I will be having coffee.

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Wherever that is, if you have questions just come up and talk to me I'll, be.

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Hanging out so I can launch.