The Rust language: memory, ownership and lifetimes [ 2014]

In 2010, Mozilla announced it was working on a new systems language, aiming to match the performance and C-interoperability profile of C in a provably safe language with concurrency, immutability, isolation and expressiveness properties closer to languages like Erlang, Haskell or Scala. While Rust presents a good variety of familiar, expressive tools from other mainstream languages, it also borrows from research languages two lesser-known key technologies: “owning pointers“ and “borrowed pointers“. This talk will briefly describe the Rust language in general terms, then focus in on these two key technologies, how they shape Rust’s memory model, performance and safety guarantees, and why you might consider using Rust in your next project. Nicholas Matsakis Nicholas Matsakis is a senior researcher at Mozilla research. He focuses on safe support for parallelism in programming languages. He is currently working on the Rust programming language as well as Parallel JavaScript.