Thursday 4 April 2019
Rust Discussion At IFP WG2.4
I've spent this week at a IFIP WG2.4 meeting, where researchers share ideas and discuss topics in programming languages, analysis and software systems. The meeting has been in Paihia in the Bay of Islands, so very conveniently located for me. My main talk was about Pernosco, but I also took the opportunity to introduce people to Rust and the very significant advances in programming language technology that it delivers. My slides are rudimentary because I wanted to minimize my talking and leave plenty of time for questions and discussion. I think it went pretty well. The main point I wanted researchers to internalize is that Rust provides a lot of structure that could potentially be exploited by static analysis and other kinds of tools, and that we should expect future systems programming languages to at least meet the bar set by Rust, so forward-looking research should try to exploit these properties. I think Rust's tight control of aliasing is especially important because aliasing is still such a problematic issue for all kinds of static analysis techniques. The audience seemed receptive.
One person asked me whether they should be teaching Rust instead of C for their "systems programming" courses. I definitely think so. I wouldn't teach Rust as a first programming language, but for a more advanced course focusing on systems programming I think Rust would be a great way to force people to think about issues such as lifetimes — issues that C programmers should grapple with but can often get away with sloppy handling of in classroom exercises.