Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

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St. Louis, MO

Rusty Runtimes: Building Languages In Rust

Until recently making a compiler from scratch that produced fast native executables with a well-tuned garbage collector meant getting really comfy with C. Rust has risen to the top of the heap as a developer-friendly systems programming language that allows the same degree of control as C but is much more expressive and sports an innovative type system that avoids the pitfalls of pointer arithmetic. Surprisingly though it hasn't seen much uptake among language implementors. This talk will present a compiler for a small, garbage-collected Scheme-like language written entirely in Rust. It will explore the pros and cons of using Rust for language development and show benchmarks comparing the garbage collector and runtime up with similar well-known languages written in C.

Aditya Siram

Aditya Siram

I work as a Scala developer by day, but write Haskell, Shen, C, Rust and ATS by candlelight. My latest passion is languages like Rust and ATS that use sophisticated type systems that allow safe memory access and high level abstractions over unboxed data structures.