Rust is a new programming language that aims to offer performance comparable to C++, but with strong safety guarantees. By leveraging ownership (affine types) and borrowing (regions), Rust programs are guaranteed to be memory safe and free of data races, all without requiring a garbage collector or – indeed – any runtime at all. Rust also has strong support for many different parallel programming patterns. This tutorial will introduce you to the core concepts of Rust through a number of hands-on exercises, giving you a feel for what it is like to write Rust code. The tutorial will also cover some of the evolution of Rust, explaining how we arrived at the design, and what we can learn from some of the false starts we made along the way.

Nicholas Matsakis is a senior researcher at Mozilla research and a member of the Rust core team. He has been working on Rust for four years and did much of the initial work on its type system and other core features. He has also done work in several just-in-time compilers as well as building high-performance networking systems. He did his undergraduate study at MIT, graduating in 2001, and later obtained a PhD in 2011, working with Thomas Gross at ETH Zurich.