Pioneering Rust in High Tech

Pioneering Rust in High Tech

Pioneering Rust in the high-tech industry!

Together with High Tech Software Cluster, we organized an event to showcase Rust’s strengths and safety features to tech companies in the Brainport region in the Netherlands.

The talks

I welcomed the 40+ developers, architects and tech decision makers, and introduced the line-up for the event:

  • What’s Rust all About, by Dion Dokter
  • To C or not to C, by Jos Wetzels
  • Embedding Rust, by Wouter Geraedts
  • Rust at Lightyear, by Jorrit Salverda

The talks covered both techical details as well as the questions, "Why should I use Rust?", and "How can I start using Rust?".

What's Rust all about

Dion kicked off the evening with an introduction to Rust, the tooling and the application of Rust for embedded systems.

Embedded devices built with Rust
Slide from Dion's talk: Embedded devices being built with Rust

Slides: What's Rust all about.

To C or not to C

Jos is a security researcher at Midnight Blue and talked about how they discovered 100+ vulnerabilities in 14 popular TCP/IP stacks. He showed the problems that are inherent when developing in C, and about the shortcomings of existing tools and methods (testing, fuzzing etc) to try and mitigate those problems.

Takeaway:

Testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never their absence!

Slides: To C or not to C

Embedding Rust

Wouter, hardware engineer and Rust developer, walked us through the process of using Rust in an existing project, answering the question: how can I take advantage of Rust ("Strict, Safe, Efficient"), without having to start from scratch?

Using Rust in your existing project
Slide from Wouter's talk: Using Rust in your existing project

Slides: Embedding Rust

Rust at Lightyear

Jorrit is a software architect at Lightyear, and gave us insight into why Lightyear chose Rust and how they use it in the development of the Lightyear Core Platform.

Lightyear
Slide from Jorrit's talk: Rust at Lightyear

Thank you

More information on the event can be found on the High Tech Software Cluster website.

I want to thank everyone who attended this evening! And special thanks to the speakers Dion Dokter, Jos Wetzels, Wouter Geraedts, Jorrit Salverda and our fellow sponsors High Tech Software Cluster and Technolution.

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Want to explore Rust?

We can help with:

  • Knowledge-sharing presentations
  • Rust workshops, Embedded Rust workshops
  • Team augmentation
  • Reducing first-project risk

> Rust services

Considering starting with Rust? Have a look at our Rust services page or contact me!

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Related articles

Will Rust still exist, and have proper support, 10, 20 or even 30 years from now? We’ve been asked this question multiple times in the last year. It is a fair question, as adopting any new technology requires an investment and comes with uncertainties, one of them being the durability of the technology. This article explains why we expect Rust to stand the test of time.

At Tweede golf we're big fans of creating applications on embedded devices with Rust and we've written a lot about it.

But if you're a hardware vendor (be it chips or full devices/systems), should you give your users Rust support in addition to your C support?

In this blog I argue that the answer to the question is yes.

A while ago, in 2020, I wrote a blog post similar to this one. Sure, it has a bit of a clickbait-y title, but it couldn't be more accurate. At the time I was full of amazement about the way Rust tackles embedded software development. I forsaw great things for Rust's future, even though Rust and its ecosystem were yet not quite mature. We're 3 years further down the road right now, which is like 300 Rust years as Rust is progressing fast. About time for an update!