Rust is a new systems-programming language that is becoming increasingly popular. It aims to combine C++’s focus on zero-cost abstractions with numerous ideas that emerged first in academia, most notably affine and region types (“ownership and borrowing”) and Haskell’s type classes (“traits”). One of the key goals for Rust is that it does not require a garbage collector.

In this talk, I’ll give a brief overview of Rust’s key features, with a focus on the type system. I’ll talk about how we leverage a few core features to offer a variety of APIs – ranging from efficient collections to various styles of parallel programming – while still guaranteeing memory safety and data-race freedom.

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.