Rust Programming Language RustConf 2016, 5 Oct 2016

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From YouTube: RustConf 2016 - The Illustrated Adventure Survival Guide for New Rustaceans by Liz Baillie

Description

The Illustrated Adventure Survival Guide for New Rustaceans by Liz Baillie

Programming is an adventure, often more harrowing than it has to be. If you're more used to higher-level languages like Ruby or JavaScript, learning Rust can feel like an impossible journey that leaves you wishing for a well-written and heavily illustrated field guide.
Good news! I have already gone down this road and am now prepared to share my adventure with you. Luckily, I was able to capture much of the flora and fauna of Rustlandia with my primitive pictorial devices (paper and pen).

A

Okay, uh-huh, so glad that's over all right welcome. Thank you all for coming today. I really have to commend you. It took a lot of courage to sign up for this mission. This adventure we're about to embark on is not for the faint of heart, so if any of you are pregnant or nursing or suffer from any kind of heart condition, or if your doctor has advised against the eating of spicy foods, I ask that you consider consulting your physician, spiritual adviser, psychic, medium or nosy, next-door neighbor before accompanying me on this journey.

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While we wait to board the ship, some of you might want to know a little bit about me. Your guide before moving forward with this seafaring journey and I get it I understand. I, don't look quite like a seasoned ship's captain and you're right, I'm, not I'm, Liz I used to be a cartoonist. I went to art. School I drew a few graphic novels. A few years ago, I learned to code I went to the Flatiron School in New, York and I started working in web development.

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Nowadays, I work at till, though right here in Portland, Oregon, mainly I work on our product skylight, which is a rails profiler that helps developers optimize their rails, apps fun fact. We also use rust, which is a big part of why I started learning rust in the first place.

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So before we get on the ship, I'll show you a map of where we'll be going right. Now our ship is docked at the port of JavaScript, just off the coast of rubyville, we'll be sailing the seas of chunky bacon and should be landing at the cargo bay of rust land eeeh in no time so get on board. Take your seats, no standing, no eating or drinking, but, most importantly, no staring at the captain's eye he's really sensitive about. It say goodbye to your loved ones. Off we go over the bending, see.

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If you look at your windows to the west, you'll notice a beautiful sight, some foliage, that's native to rubyville an abstract syntax tree. Its nodes are particularly lovely. This time of year, you're probably used to seeing these in rubyville. They tend to sprout any time some code gets thrown into the interpreter just before it gets turned into byte code, so the Ruby virtual machine can run it.

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As you might already know, Ruby is an interpreted language, so this is more or less what you're used to if you're a rubyist, but in wrestlin dia will have to remember to compile our code before we can run it. Otherwise it won't work. So when we get there, just remember to keep raises cargo build and cargo run they'll come in handy when we reach the shore and start trying to chat up the locals.

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If you try to just run your code directly like you did in Ruby, though they won't know what the heck you're talking about, I also forgot to mention on the way out: you'll notice, a big pile of mains, don't forget to take one you'll need to put all the code that gets run inside of mains, very important, all right, everybody off the ship. Here we are welcome to rust land yeah. Let's check out the town. Remember things move a lot faster here, so be careful check it out. It's the stack in the heap.

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Let's go inside, you're probably used to not giving much thought to memory back in rubyville before I came to Russell Andy I had never heard I had heard of the sack in the heap. I knew it had something to do with memory, but I never really understood it watch how things work at the bar people come in and they give their programs to the bartender and she compiles and runs them.

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Someone wants a fancy, whiskey and a cheap whiskey. The good stuff is fancy, so we put that in a box and we store it on the heat because we want it to be able to stick around for a while. Even though it's high up and it's a little slower to get to most things in rust are stored on the stack unless you specify otherwise people in rest, land, yeah, I. Guess they really liked the cheap stuff.

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Which is why we had to put the fancy whiskey in a box, so we run this program. The good whisky gets a spot on the heap at the far far end of our available memory. That's like one of those cages and the top, and we put a pointer on the stack that points to that spot on the heap.

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Next, on the stack we put the cheap stuff, the cheap stuff gets served up first, because it's on top and then we have the pointer to the fancy stuff which the bartender has to go way way up to the top of the heap to get what she does. All that sea travel made me hungry. Let's check out one of our local eateries I've heard good things about this. One Oh, sir I can't quite read this menu I'm used to seeing things like this class appetizer bacon.

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B

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Know me for as chunky bacon end end. Instead, I sell these likes trucks and impuls and like what's.

B

This all about huh waiter.

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So sorry about them, I know this isn't something you're used to back in rubyville, but we have no class no.

B

B

This is heresy. How.

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Are we gonna get along with her class? It's the one thing separating us from the animals. Don't worry I, don't worry at all. You can still get what you need here. Here's the chunky, bacon struck. This is where we define all the attributes we expect out of it: flavor, chunkiness price, etc.

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So then I can just do something like this and I'll be all set. No, no, my good lady! That's for that. You need to write an imple, that's an implementation of chunky bacon. So if you want a new instance of chunky bacon, you'll have to write a new method yourself. It doesn't just happen automatically. Oh well, very good.

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I'll have a salad, and now a word from our sponsors.

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Hey Mack me yeah, you there you want to try some rest. You mean the iron oxide produced as a result of a redox reaction of iron and oxygen in the presence of water or a Mercer. What do you been reading? Wikipedia? Not that restful rustling, my friend, oh yeah, that cool new systems, programming language, all the kids at school are talking about the very same. Well. What about it? Do you like abstraction without overhead I, don't know how about concurrency without data races, I think what about memory safety without garbage collection?

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That sounds good I, really don't you'll love, rust.

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Welcome to mutability Lake it's a lovely day, so many of our distinguished townspeople are out selling their toy ships. Some are fancier than others. Some are mutable. Some aren't this one. Here is a nice one, this one's not mutable, so we can't change anything about it, but I can show it to you. Look how nice. If we try to change anything about it, though hey you can't do that. Oh, the compiler is yelling at us, so we know we can't change this one. It's immutable! Let's try another one cool, this one's! Definitely mutable.

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Let's make a few changes before we return it perfect compiler. What do you think? No? What's.

B

The matter compiler you put wheels on it, it's not a bone anymore. It's a car. You said.

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You would return a boat, you must return a boat, ok, ok, I'll, take the wheels off I thought. Look pretty cool, though hey that look, that boat looks pretty cool you each know that boat doesn't belong to you. Oh sorry, compiler who owns this boat I, do, oh sorry, can I borrow it. I was hoping to play with it in my bathtub. Well, you bring it back of course, go right ahead. Don't forget this. Everyone knows you're, just borrowing. It.

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I hope this works.

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Hey thanks for returning my boat compiler. Does everything look good to you know you added a tugboat? That's not okay, but compiler. These boats are all vectors of strings. All I did was push a tugboat onto it. A tugboat is a string. The tugboat isn't yours, and neither is the boat yeah that tugboat is mine.

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Well, what? If I just boom punch the tugboat guy in the face and hit him with a remove, looks like no one owns this tugboat. Now you want to talk about on your boat, sir sure.

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Well now you have one push tugboat and now another word from our sponsor. Yes, hey.

B

Kid, what did you get all that about ownership and borrowing? huh That's how we get a lot of the cool stuff. I was telling you about before.

A

You mean like when you were yelling memory safety without garbage collection at me. Yes,.

B

You got it I only.

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Know Ruby, though, so these aren't really problems I've ever had to deal with. Well, let me tell you if you are a C++ program or you'd, be really excited.

B

Okay, you bet it's okay,.

A

Can you just teach me something about rust, so the kids at school will finally think I'm cool sure.

B

Thing kid: let's try a less convoluted metaphor watch this.

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Hey again, travelers have you seen our esteemed library, it's pretty great. You can borrow just about anything as long as you return it. They even have this great big pile of books over here that don't belong to anyone. You can just take them. If you want and then they're all yours every so often, people will come by with donations of books. They don't need anymore. It's great.

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If you want to borrow a book, you just use your purse and if you try to change a book while you're borrowing it the compiler will yell at you and your code won't compile.

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However, if you see something you like in the free pile, you can just take it and do whatever you want with it. It's yours you're there in the back. You had a question. Yes, what? If the book is immutable reference, great question friend? Well, you might very well be borrowing something that's mutable, like our collection of coloring books. Here you can continue coloring them.

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While you have them- and you can return them altered, only one person can have one out at a time, though, we also have some exquisite corpse books that are pretty cool every time. Someone borrows one of these. They add a little bit themselves before bringing it back. I want to borrow.

B

The exquisite corpse book me too I want to borrow it to know.

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No more than one mutable reference at a time you can have it now. We have to wait till he's done before you can borrow it. Oh man, no complaining do you.

B

Want a day to race, do you.

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Know: okay, then, you might have noticed how clean and beautiful arrest Lin dia is, and yet you might also have noticed there are no garbage cans anywhere. It's a it's actually, because it's because of that system of borrowing and ownership that Roslyn dia is able to do without garbage collection. It's a big part of what makes everything so fast and safe here, but isn't it annoying having the compiler yelling at you all the time?

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Hey, don't judge the compiler so harshly? Look you hurt his feelings, he's not such a bad guy, he's just making sure we do everything we do is good before we can run it. The compiler is our friend who just wants the best. For us sure his advice might be a little hard to understand at times, but once you get to know, him he's a really good guy, I promise and now another word from our sponsors tonight on WR St.

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It's the true story of how one statically typed programming language risked it all to figure out how to handle when things go wrong. Being and Nothingness, and error handling based on a true story.

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If everything goes right, the reactor will cool down and the city will be saved, but if something goes wrong, if this whole thing goes south well, I guess I'll just do nothing. I mean this seems fine right, just return an option. I mean the Tyler. The compiler feels fine about it right. Looking good.

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Meanwhile, across town, the grocery.

B

Store doesn't have the mustard I like.

B

Red Alert red alert all hands on deck, shut it down, shut it down. I need my Dijon compiler agrees. Don't you compiler looking good.

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Just because the code compiles doesn't mean it's something, you should do results for when something could go terribly wrong and you need to throw an error option for when it's okay to just do nothing the opposite of what just happened.

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Live it. Learn it love. It errors.

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Hey welcome back just in time for the last boat to rubyville. I, sincerely hope you enjoyed your stay and that you visit again soon. If you want to stay a little longer, there are some very nice boxes at the heap. Otherwise the boat is ready to board on your way back. We do have some very nice reading material for you. If you're interested in learning more about rust, I strongly recommend, starting with rust by example.

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This online book will lead you, through the by hand step-by-step through many examples explaining everything along the way after that, I recommend, looking at the official rust reference documentation very helpful if you'd like to try your hand at some rust of your very own from scratch, there are many excellent exercises available at exorcism.

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If you have any questions, there is also the rest reddit and the user forums, or you can chat on one of the many channels on IRC in preparation for this talk with some help from yahuda I've been working on a playable, text-based adventure game version of this talk in Ruby, which I'm porting over to rust. This way you can check out Ruby and rust code side-by-side, and you can actually play the game you can check it out at this address. The risk code is still in development.

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Most of it is on a branch called just rust things, but the Ruby version is my master and it's playable. So even though I haven't plugged this story in yet to the game, you can play a game and right now it's a little bit random, but anyway, I'm gonna be doing a lot of about moving I'm gonna, be working on this. A lot in the coming weeks so feel free to check it out.

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Thank you. Last but not least, I want to thank tilde, my employer for allowing me to work on the ruby rust game on company time and yahuda for working with me on the rest side of the game. Patiently answering my questions and helping me when I got stuck once again, my name is Liz. I am on twitter @, underscore liz bailey, because Liz Bailey was taken and that's it. The end.