This week I've had the pleasure of attending and speaking at RustLab, a conference dedicated to Rust in Florence, Italy.
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!
