Rust StuCo F25 Outline

Each lecture is 50 minutes on Tuesdays from 7:00-7:50pm. On some weeks, we might have extra content planned for after lecture under After Dark, but we'll only do it if people want to stay and hang out since it won't be required material.

Course Materials:

• Main Source: The Rust Programming Language (The Rust Book)
  • The Rust Lang Book in video format on YouTube
• Rust By Example
• The Rustonomicon
• The Rust Reference
• Rust for Rustaceans - PDF available on O'Reilly for CMU students
• Exercism
• rustlings

Render Slides

The lecture slides are organized in directories with the format NN_topic_name (e.g., 01_introduction, 02_ownership_p1).

To render slides:

# Render all slides
python3 render_slides.py --all

# Render only modified slides (default behavior)
python3 render_slides.py

# Render specific topics by name
python3 render_slides.py --topics introduction ownership_p1

# Preview what would be rendered without actually rendering
python3 render_slides.py --dry-run --all

# Force render all slides
python3 render_slides.py --force

Schedule

Week 1: Introduction

• Why Rust?
• cargo basics
• Rust Syntax
  • Variables and Mutability
  • Types
  • Functions, Statements, and Expressions
  • Control Flow
• Course Logistics
  • Installing Rust

After Dark

• Setting up rust-analyzer
• RustRover

Week 2: Ownership

• Ownership
  • The String Type
  • Move Semantics
• References and Borrowing
• Slices
• The Vec Type

Week 3: Structs and Enums

• Ownership review
• Structs
• Enums
  • Pattern Matching

Week 4: Standard Collections and Generics

• The Vec<T> Type
• The String Type
• The HashMap<K, V> Type
• Generics

After Dark

• Remaining collections in std::collections

Week 5: Error Handling and Traits

• Error Handling
• Traits

After Dark

• anyhow

Week 6: Modules and Testing

• Packages and Crates
• Modules
  • Module Paths and File Structure
  • The use Keyword
• Testing
  • Unit Tests
  • Integration Tests

Week 7: Crates, Closures, and Iterators

• no_std: rand, time
• std: clap, log, tracing, anyhow, flamegraph
• Closures
  • Captures
  • The move Keyword
  • Fn traits
• Iterators
  • Iterator Trait and next
• Loops vs. Iterators

After Dark

• More Essential Rust Crates
  • rayon
  • serde
  • criterion

Week 8: Lifetimes

• Validating References
• The Borrow Checker
  • Lifetimes vs. Scope
  • Lifetimes vs. Memory
• Generic Lifetimes
• Lifetime Annotations
• Lifetime Elision
• 'static Lifetimes

Week 9: Box<T> and Trait Objects

• The Box<T> Type
• The Deref Trait and Deref Coercion
• The Drop Trait and std::mem::drop
• Object-Oriented Programming
• Trait Objects
  • Dynamic dispatch with dyn
• Dynamically Sized Types
• Object Safety

Week 10: Smart Pointers and unsafe

• The Rc<T> Type
• The RefCell<T> Type
• Memory Leaks
• Unsafe Superpowers
• Raw Pointers
• FFI

After Dark

• Cow<'a, B>
• UnsafeCell<T> and Cell<T>
• Implementation of:
  • Cell<T>
  • RefCell<T>
  • Rc<T>

Week 11: Parallelism

• The Arc<T> Smart Pointer
• The Mutex<T> Smart Pointer
• The RwLock<T> Smart Pointer
• std::sync::mspc::channel
• Shared State vs Channels
• Sync and Send traits

After Dark

• Weak<T>
• CondVar
• Implementation of:
  • Arc<T>
  • Mutex<T>

Week 12: Concurrency

• async
• await
• The Pin<T> Type
• TODO

Week 13: Macros

• Declarative Macros
  • macro_rules!
• Procedural Macros
• TODO