This week I've had the pleasure of attending and speaking at RustLab, a conference dedicated to Rust in Florence, Italy. Here's the recording of the talk.
It was only the second conference I’d ever attended, and the first I’d spoken at, so it was quite a novel experience for me. And I had a lot of fun! The conference was well organized, the venue was great, the pastries for the coffee breaks were excellent, I met a ton of smart people, and there were a lot of really good talks.
I really enjoyed the talks from Tommaso Allevi about writing a memory allocator profiler - we had to do something similar (though slightly) simpler at work, and his library would have been super useful to have! Andrea Righi gave a really cool talk about using BPF, sched_ext, and a custom AI model to extend the Linux kernel scheduler from user space. Luca Palmieri gave a really interesting closing keynote talk about dependency injection in Rust with traits, discussing the downsides of the trait-based approach commonly used and how he is solving the problem in a different way for his Pavex web framework.
I also loved the experience of actually giving a talk. I discussed my JIT compiler, Emjay, and I think the talk went well. There were a good number of questions, and a few people told me they enjoyed the talk during coffee breaks, so I am definitely satisfied. If you're interested, the slides are here, but there's nothing really new that isn't in my blog post about Emjay already. I'll add a link here to the video recording once it's available.
Not satisfied with one talk, I also ended up giving a lightning talk on the first day of the conference! During the coffee break in the morning I saw that there were still a few slots for them, and I've been planning to write a blog post about arena allocators for a while now, so I signed up, spent lunch preparing a couple of slides, and then gave my six-minute talk in the early afternoon. 😂 I think the talk went well even if it was a bit hastily prepared - the very short time was just enough to explain the idea.
Overall, it was a great experience, and I am looking forward to next year's conference! I want to thank in particular RustLab's organizers for accepting my talk proposal and for all the work preparing the conference, and anyone who attended my talks - I hope you enjoyed them and you got to learn something new!
