Weeknote 9: EuroRust 2024

This week I attended EuroRust 2024 in Vienna, Austria. It was a two-day conference about the Rust programming language, organized by Mainmatter, a Rust consultancy¹, and this was the second time it was organized.

This was my first Rust conference. Unfortunately, it ended up being more of a miss than a hit for me, and it might be the last one in a while.

It was on me, really. I go to conferences to meet people, not for the talks. However, I was not in the mood for getting to know new people and I didn’t have many pre-existing connections to the community, so the hallway track didn’t amount to much.

Conference impressions

Overall the conference was well-run. There were some snags, but nothing unusual. The talks that I attended were fine, but none of them really hit it out of the park. Not much to report.

There was a bit of unconference in the form of “impl rooms”. Open source maintainers could post ideas for contributing to their projects and there was time and space reserved for them to mentor the contributors. I did a couple of PRs but unfortunately they could not be merged during the event.

So was there anything surprising about the event?

Level of experience. I’ve used Rust professionally alongside Python since late 2023 and I’ve thought myself as a newcomer to Rust, but it turned out I have plenty of experience already.

Many attendees seemed enthusiastic about Rust but they weren’t actually using it much. They wanted to find Rust jobs or to introduce Rust at the workplace. As a veteran of Clojure and Haskell communities, I’ve had this conversations many times before! I think the Rust people will have more success, though.

Focus. The conference seemed focused on the language itself. This was foreshadowed by the opening talk by Jon Gjengset about things people struggle with when learning Rust. He dove into technical details and talked about things like understanding the Send and Sync traits.

I’ve spent my time on nerding over programming languages, but I’m more interested in what kind of systems people are building in Rust and how. Charlie Marsh’s closing talk about how uv, the Python package manager, was built in Rust and what kind of tricks they used to make it fast was much more to my liking.

Descriptive complexity theory. From Amanda Stjerna’s talk on Polonius, the next generation of Rust borrow checker, the following factoid stuck to my head: Datalog is a language for programs that can be run in P. Surely I’ve encountered this fact before, but it’s interesting in any case.

Vienna was cool though

After the first conference day, I decided to skip the dinners and went to St. Stephen’s Cathedral to listen to a concert by the Finnish organist Jan Lehtola. That was great! Bach’s Chaconne was a powerful experience when played with the giant organ of the cathedral.

I also had time for Egon Schiele’s paintings at Leopold Museum and for a glass of Austrian wine at Die Rundbar (great wine, relaxed atmosphere). Vienna seemed like a nice city and I would like to go there again.

Photo: The huge inflatable EuroRust mascot at the conference venue.