Material for the course, An Introduction to Rust.

Learn the Rust Programming Language

Rust is a systems programming language designed for safety, concurrency, and performance. It has gained popularity for its innovative features that prevent memory-related bugs and allow for low-latency, performant, and efficient computation. Understanding Rust can provide new perspectives and approaches to building robust, concurrent, and high-performance applications.

In this 3-day workshop, attendees will receive a beginner-level introduction to Rust. By the end of the course, all participants, regardless of background, will have a solid entry-level foundation in Rust and be able to confidently use it for various real-world programming tasks.

NOTE: Although no familiarity with Scala is required, special attention will be given to the similarities and differences between Scala and Rust.

Who Should Attend

Any developers who are looking to move into Rust, explore systems level programming, or build efficient cloud-native applications. Scala developers who want to explore Rust as an alternative or complementary language, particularly for building safe, concurrent, and high-performance systems.

Prerequisites

No prior knowledge of Rust is required. Familiarity with procedural programming in some programming languages is required.

Topics

• Introduction to Rust
  • Overview and goals of Rust
  • Basic syntax and concepts
• Ownership and Borrowing in Rust
  • Ownership rules and their benefits
  • Borrowing and references
  • Lifetimes and their implications
• Rust's Type System
  • Algebraic data types and pattern matching
  • Enums and Options
  • Traits and trait objects
  • Type inference and generics
• Error Handling in Rust
  • The Result type and its usage
  • Error propagation and handling
  • Custom error types
• Concurrency and Parallelism in Rust
  • Fearless concurrency and its advantages
  • Threads and message passing
  • Shared state and synchronization primitives
  • Async/await and Futures in Rust
• Modules, Packages, and Crates
  • Organizing code with modules and packages
  • Using and managing external crates
• Testing and Debugging in Rust
  • Unit testing and integration testing
  • Rust's built-in test framework
  • Debugging techniques and tools

Daily Structure

Three days, 7 hours a day starting at 09:00 London Time, until 16:00 London Time.

Attendance

Attendance at this workshop is fully remote. Attendees will be provided with a link to a remote meeting session the day before the event, in which they can see and hear the workshop, ask the instructor questions, and chat with other attendees.

Setup Instructions

To install Rust, you'll need to install rustup, the Rust toolchain installer.

Rustup will also install the Rust compiler (rustc) and the Cargo build tool by default.

On Unix-based systems such as Linux and MacOS, run:

$ curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

On Windows, download and run the rustup-init.exe from:

https://rustup.rs/

After running the above commands, rustup, rustc, and Cargo will be installed.

You may need to restart your terminal or run the following to update your current shell environment:

$ source $HOME/.cargo/env