Rust Programming Language RustFest Kyiv 2017, 10 May 2017

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Lee Baillie - The Illustrated Adventure Survival Guide for New Rustaceans

Description

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).

Lee Baillie
https://twitter.com/_lbaillie
https://github.com/lbaillie

A

So uh I talk really loud actually have to move this. The full title of this talk, which does not actually fit on most CFP submissions forms, is a the illustrated adventure survival guide for new restorations and natives of rubyville, with apologies to why the lucky stiff, I, don't know how many people here are familiar with the work of why, but if you're not I would strongly recommend looking looking him up after this, he was a rubyist who did a lot of really interesting work.

A

That was a big reason for me getting into programming, and this entire talk is basically an homage to wise poignant guide to ruby. So here we go. Welcome I really have to commend you. It took a lot of courage to sign up for this mission.

A

This adventure we're about to embark on is not for the weak or 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 accompany me on this journey. While we wait to board the ship, some of you might want to know a bit more about me.

A

Your guide before moving forward with this seafaring journey and I get it I understand. I, don't quite look like a seasoned ship's captain and you're right, I'm, not I'm, Liz I used to be a cartoonist. I drew comic books. I went to art, school I drew a few graphic novels, and a few years ago, I learned to code I went to a place called the Flatiron School in New, York and I started working in web development.

A

Nowadays, I work at Tilda in Portland Oregon back in the United States, mainly I work on our product skylight, uh which he mentioned, which is an application that helps developers working in rails or other Ruby based frameworks optimize their apps I. Also. We also use rust at work, which is a big reason why I started learning rust in the first place so before we get on the ship, I'll show you a map of where we'll be going right.

A

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, let's get onboard, take your seats, no standings, no eating or drinking and, most importantly, no staring at the captain's eye he's really sensitive about it. He's a fish I, don't know, say goodbye to your loved ones and off we go and over the bounding main and then the ship's song. This is a song about ships.

A

If you all look out 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 if you're from rubyville, they tend to sprout any time some code gets thrown into the interpreter just before it gets turned into byte codes, so the Ruby virtual machine can run. As you might already know, Ruby is an interpreted language, so this is more or less what you're used to if you're rubyist, but in wrestlin dia.

A

We have to remember to compile our code before we can run it. Otherwise it won't work so before we yet so when we get there. Just remember to keep raises cargo bills and cargo run they'll come in handy when we reach the shore and start trying to chat up the locals. If you try to just run your code directly like you did in rubyville, they won't know what you're talking about so I almost forgot to mention on the way out. You'll notice, a big pile of means, don't forget to take one.

A

You will put all the code that gets run for your program inside of main, unless you're building a library which we're not just yet. This is very important, all right, everybody off the ship. Here we are welcome to Rus clan dia. 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 brew pub.

A

Let's go inside you're, probably used to not giving much thought to memory back in rubyville before I came to rust, land eeeh I had heard of the stack in the heap and 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 she compiles and runs them.

A

Someone wants a fancy, whiskey and a cheap whiskey. The good stuff is fancy, so we put that in a box and store it on the heap because we want it to be able to stick around for a while. Even though it's high up and a bit slower to get to most, things in rust are stored on the stack unless you specify otherwise, which is why we had to put the fancy whiskey in a box in order to store it on the heap.

A

So when we run this program, the good whisky gets a spot on the heap at the far far end of our available memory, and we put a pointer on the stack that points to the spot on the heap. Next, on the stack we put the cheap stuff. In this case it is old granddad, which is a very terrible American liquor.

A

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 which she does all that sea travel made me hungry. Let's check out one of our local Erie's I've heard good things about this one. It's called cafe destruct Oh.

A

Sir I can't quite read this menu I'm used to seeing things like this. There is a defined class and the instance methods for that class are defined with a simple def and they end with the word end.

A

Instead, I see all these strange new things like struts and Impuls, and what's that all about huh we're so sorry, madam I know this, isn't something you're used to razz back in rubyville, but we here in Rosslyn do we. uh We have no class.

B

B

I can't believe it. This is terrible. How are we going to get along without class? It's the one thing separating us from the animals.

A

Don't worry, don't worry at all, you can still get what you need here here is the chunky bacon struck. That's where we define all the attributes we expect out of it, such as flavor, chunkiness, price, etc. So.

B

A

Just do something like chunky, bacon, Cohen, :, new maple 5:3, like that all just be all set. No, no, my good lady for that you will need to write and improve that's an implementation of chunky bacon. So if you want a new instance of chunky, bacon, you'll just have to write a new method yourself. It doesn't just happen automatically.

B

Well, then, bring it. I'll have a salad and now.

A

A word from our sponsors: hey Mack me yeah, you there you want to try some rust. You mean the iron oxide produced as a result of a redox reaction of iron and oxygen in the presence of water or air moisture. What have you been reading? Wikipedia? No, not that Russell rustling, my friend, oh yeah, that cool new systems, programming language, all the cool kids at school are talking about the very same. Well. What about it?

A

Do you, like abstraction without overhead I, don't know.

B

A

About concurrency, without data races, I think what about memory safety without garbage collection? That sounds good, I, just I! Really don't you.

B

A

Welcome to mutability Lake it's a lovely day, so many of our distinguished townspeople are out sailing their toys ships. Some are fancier than others. Some are mutable and some aren't this one here is a nice one. This word is not mutable. The side of the boat reads: SS won't change, so we can't change anything about it. I can pick it up and I can show it to you look how nice, but if we try to change anything about it, hey.

B

You can't do that. ah The.

A

Compiler is yelling at us, so we know we can't change this boat. It's mutable, let's try another one. Let's look back at what other ships are on the lake cool, this one's definitely mutable. It has a little flag that says mute. Let's just make a few changes before we return it. Let's add some wheels to this boat, perfect compiler. What do you think? No?

A

What's the matter? Compiler you put wheels on a boat, you thrown a boat anymore. It's a car. You said you would return a boat. You must return a boat, as is clearly illustrated here. The boat struck does not include anything about wheels.

A

Ok, I'll, take the wheels off I thought. It looks pretty cool, though. Let's look for another boat in the lake, hey that one looks good I'm just going to quietly pick it up and walk out of the lake. No one will mind right. Fine.

B

Compiler, hey that boat doesn't belong to you, I'm.

A

Sorry compiler, who owns this boat I do I'm, so sorry can I borrow it. I was hoping to play with it in my bathtub. ah Well, will you bring it back of course, go right ahead, don't forget to sand for sand, so everyone knows you're, just borrowing it so now I'm going to we're going to have a musical montage. Let's see how it goes.

A

Here's me in the boat eating dinner. Here's me in the boat enjoying a few ice cream cones.

A

Here's me in the boat skateboarding with a police officer chasing us. Finally, here's me in the boat having lovely picnic together, I guess we can go back to the lake and return it to its owner.

A

Hey thanks for returning my boat compiler. Does everything look good to you know you added a tugboat? That's.

B

Not okay, what.

A

Compiler, these boats are all vectors of strings. All I did was push a tugboat onto it. A tugboat.

B

Is a string, the tugboat isn't your then neither is the boat.

A

Yeah that tug board is mine. Well, what if I just 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, let's do boat that pushed and pass in the tugboat yeah. You have one and now another word from our sponsors.

A

B

Did you get all that information about.

A

Ownership and borrowing.

B

That's how we get a lot of cool stuff I was telling you about.

A

You mean like when you were yelling memory safety without garbage collection at me, and all that, yes, you got it I only know Ruby, so these are early problems. I've had to deal with. Well, let me tell you: if you are C programmer you'd be really excited.

A

Okay, you bet it's okay. Can you just teach me something about rust, so the kids at school will finally think I'm cool sure thing kid. Let's try a less convoluted metaphor watch this hello 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 they're yours every so often people will come by with donations of books. They don't need anymore.

A

It's great. If you want to borrow a book, you just use your ampersand.

A

Let's see if you try to change a book while you're borrowing it the compiler will yell at you and your code won't compile.

A

However, if you see something you like in the free pile, you can just take it and do what you want with it. It's yours you're there on the back. You had a question. Yes, what about? If a book is a mutable reference, great question friend, you might very well be borrowing something that's mutable, like our collection of coloring books. Here such titles as color, my Sartre hell is other colors and the colors of ambiguity.

A

You can continue coloring in them. While you have them and then you 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 of it to themselves. They have it a little bit themselves before they bring it back. I want to borrow that exquisite corpse book me too.

A

I want to borrow it to know more than one mutable reference at a time you can have it now, but you'll have to wait until the first person is done before you can borrow it. Oh man, no complaining do.

B

You want a date erase do you know.

A

Ok, then, so you might have noticed how clean and beautiful Russell Andy is, and yet you might have also noticed that there are no garbage cans anywhere. It's actually because of that system of borrowing and ownership that Russell andia 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 yell at you all the time?

A

Hey now, don't judge the compiler so harshly. Look you heard his feelings he's crying he's, not such a bad guy he's just making sure everything we do is good. Before we can run it. The compiler is our friend. He 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 really a good guy, I promise, and now another word from our sponsors tonight on WR St.

A

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.

A

Pictured is a person sitting at a desk labeled nuclear reactor console frantically yelling. If.

B

Everything goes right, the reactor will cool down and the city will be saved, but if something goes wrong, if this.

A

Whole thing goes: south, none I'll just do nothing, it seems fine. Just likes return, an option right I mean the compiler feels fine about it right. Looking good. Meanwhile, across town, the grocery store doesn't have the.

B

Mustard I, like error, Red, Alert, red alert. Everyone pay attention to me, shut down. Everything I need my Dijon compiler. You agree. Don't you compiler looking.

A

Good public service announcement, 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 live it, learn it love. It hey! Welcome back just in time for the last boat back 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.

A

We do have some very nice reading material for you. If you interested in learning more about risk, I strongly recommend, starting with roasted by example. These this online book will teach will lead you by the hand, step by step through many examples explaining everything along the way. After that, I recommend looking at the official rust reference documentation, it is very helpful if you'd like to try your hand at some Russell, your very own, from scratch. There are many excellent exercises available at exorcism. Do.

A

If you have questions there is the rust, Reddit and user forums, or you can chat on one of the many channels on our IRC.

A

Finally, in preparation for the original version of this talk at Russ conf last year, with some help from my boss, who's UQ Hooda cats, I developed a playable text-based adventure game in both Ruby and rust. This way, if you are a Rubeus, you can check out Ruby and Russ code that do similar things side-by-side, but you can actually also play the game. You can check it out at github, comm, slash, tilde, IO, flash learning, rust. Both versions are playable but I, of course, impartial to the rest version.

A

Last but not least, I want to thank Tilda for allowing me to work on that game on company time and you hooda for working with me on the rough side of the game patiently answering my questions. Also thank you to the sponsors who made it possible for me to be here. This is my first time in Europe and is very exciting for me. Thank you for having me once again. My name is Liz. I am on twitter at underscore ell bailey, and that is it the end. Thank you.