Future Meetups

Bevy, Bits, & Cats (Rust July Talks)

Tonight we’ll be hearing from:

"Fallible has been working on a digital card game for 2 years, having migrated her client-side code base to Bevy after prototyping with Godot for 6 months. Bevy is the Game Engine darling of the Rust community, and has been subject to both much love and hate over its half-decade of development. What's it like trusting and using this technology over time? What will it look like in the future? Has sticking with it been worth it?"

"Fallible Things is an Artist and Technical Writer involved in the local independent game development scene, and an infrequent Bevy docs contributor."

"In this talk, we'll look at two distinct lineages of programming languages: languages whose primary aim is to enable a direct interaction with physical hardware, and languages which aim to provide a mathematical foundation for arbitrary computation. We'll talk about why these two goals so often seem to sit in opposition to each other, and how Rust manages to position itself at the intersection of these two histories. Finally, we'll use what we've learned to look to the future and put together a wishlist for the next generation of approachable & safe programming languages."

Matthew Liam Healy is a software engineer, applied mathematician and amateur stand-up comedian. Their research interests lie at the intersection of type theory and programming language ergonomics. They currently work at Duna on a programming language for encoding business compliance policies. Previously they worked at SoundCloud on authentication and audio playback, so there's a good chance you've run some code they wrote.

Plan for the evening:

  • 18:30: doors open
  • 19:00 → 20:30: talks + q/a
  • 20:30: move for drinks 🍻 to Holyrood 9A, where we have a table booked (this is nearby Patersons Land)

Past Meetups

Rust May Talks: Aetherus + Pgrx

Tonight we’ll be hearing from:

Cristian Bourceanu on "Aetherus: Monte-Carlo radiative transfer with photon history tracking of interactions for materials and surfaces". From Cristian:

  • "Monte-Carlo simulations are ubiquous in producing simulated results for problems that are challenging to solve numerically or analytically, but they can be described in terms of statistics. Aetherus is the first known multispectral time-resolved Monte-Carlo simulation, making extensive use of the Rust ecosystem: serde, rayon, nalegbra with SIMD speed-up. The big challenge is to analyse the results, for which we have added a novel events tracking method, using an encoding inspired from RISC-V 32-bit instruction encoding. This enables to group signals together based on various criteria and understand the effects underlying the detected photons histogram. A Domain Specific Language (DSL) was developed with chumsky to faciliate filtering based on an intuitive script."

  • "I am a PhD student at University of Edinburgh, investigating Multispectral LIDAR. Previously worked as a RISC-V CPU design engineer at Codasip and a firmware engineer at Hypervolt. Now trying to bring some of this knowledge together."

  • Slides and related content:

Hugo Tunius on "Lessons from building a custom Postgres type with Rust and Pgrx"

This time we'll be trying out hosting provided by the Edinburgh Community Rooms project at Patersons Land (no slant against our previous company hosts, who are still much appreciated, it's just good to mix things up occasionally 😀).

Plan for the evening:

  • 18:30: doors open
  • 19:00 → 20:00: talks + q/a
  • 20:00: move for drinks 🍻 to Holyrood 9A, where we have a table booked (this is nearby Patersons Land)

Rust and Friends (daytime coffee)

Time for some 🌱 chat about Rust!

As is now usual, we have a couple of events in the same week to cater to different preferences:

  • 🍻 An evening pub event on Wed 1st April (see other Meetup Event)
  • ☕️ A daytime coffee event on Fri 3rd April (this event)

Please feel free to come to both 🙂

Rust and Friends (evening pub)

Time for some 🌱 chat about Rust!

As is now usual, we have a couple of events in the same week to cater to different preferences:

  • 🍻 An evening pub event on Wed 1st April (this event)
  • ☕️ A daytime coffee event on Fri 3rd April (see other Meetup Event)

Please feel free to come to both 🙂

Note that we are having this pub event on the Wednesday as we know some people can't make Thursdays, so we're mixing it up a bit.

Rust and Friends (daytime coffee)

We will be eeeeasing-in to 2026 with a daytime ☕️ session in January 😎.

Please do come along, especially if you've not been before. The atmosphere is pretty chill and no need or expectation to be an expert in Rust (or any language).

Hope to see you there!

Exotically Sized Types, and Rust in Space at Spire!

Tonight we’ll be hearing from:

David Wood on "Extending Rust’s notions of sizedness". From David:

  • "All of Rust’s types either implement the Sized trait, and so have a statically known size during compilation, or do not, and are assumed to have a size computed at runtime. However, this misses out two categories of type: types whose size is unknown during compilation but is a runtime constant, and types whose size can never be known. The former is a prerequisite to stable scalable vector types and the latter is needed to unblock extern types. This talk explores the ongoing “Hierarchy of Sized types” efforts and how the language is being extended to improve support for exotically sized types."
  • David leads the Rust team at Arm, is co-lead of the upstream Rust compiler team and a board member of the Rust Foundation.

Tiago Santos and Eren Şimşek on "Rust in Space at Spire":

  • Spire designs, builds and operates the world’s largest multipurpose satellite constellation. Tiago and Eren will introduce us to this domain and then go into how and where they use Rust.
  • Tiago is a Software Engineering Director at Spire and Eren is a Software Engineer at Spire.

We are generously hosted once again within Perk's new Edinburgh office, who will also be providing 🍕and 🍻!

Rust and Friends (daytime coffee)

Time for some 🍁chat about Rust!

As is now usual, we have a couple of events in the same week to cater to different preferences:

  • 🍻 An evening pub event on Thu 23rd (see other Meetup Event)
  • ☕️ A daytime coffee event on Fri 24th (this event)

Please feel free to come to both 🙂

Rust and Friends (evening pub)

Time for some 🍁chat about Rust!

As is now usual, we have a couple of events in the same week to cater to different preferences:

  • 🍻 An evening pub event on Thu 23rd (this event)
  • ☕️ A daytime coffee event on Fri 24th (see other Meetup Event)

Please feel free to come to both 🙂

Want a Squeezable / Modern / Helpful / Wide Language? Choose Four

Rust: Squeezable, Modern, Helpful, Wide

Synopsis

Want a Squeezable / Modern / Helpful / Wide Language? Choose Four

Rust, a language born in 2006, may now be in your kettle, your browser, and your AI. Somehow it's managed to do this whilst still being the "most admired" programming language.

Come along to find out what "Squeezable / Modern / Helpful / Wide" mean in practice, and why, in Rust, you can do hard things and still have a good time (eventually).

Slides

slides

Bio

Mike Moran is a Principal Engineer at Skyscanner. He has been programming in some form since the early 90's, and on the Internet since 1994, when he created a website for Comet Shoemaker-Levy hitting Jupiter.

This was all before search-engines existed so you can't prove him wrong. Since that time he's worked in startups, scale-ups and behemoths, been a manager and an IC, and helped Skyscanner reach Unicorn status.

He's fallen in and out of love with multiple (computer) languages so knows how to spot a fad. His programming in Rust started in 2019, and he's been running the Rust and Friends Edinburgh Meetup since 2020.

Rust and Friends (daytime coffee)

It's August in Edinburgh. It's busy 🏃. It's sweltering 💦. But still: there is always space for Rust 🦀!

As is now usual, we have a couple of events in the same week to cater to different preferences:

  • 🍻 An evening pub event on Thu 28th (see other Meetup Event)
  • ☕️ A daytime coffee event on Fri 29th (this event)

Please feel free to come to both 🙂

Rust and Friends (evening pub)

It's August in Edinburgh. It's busy 🏃. It's sweltering 💦. But still: there is always space for Rust 🦀!

As is now usual, we have a couple of events in the same week to cater to different preferences:

  • 🍻 An evening pub event on Thu 28th (this event)
  • ☕️ A daytime coffee event on Fri 29th (see other Meetup Event)

Please feel free to come to both 🙂

July talks, "The Crab and the Pufferfish ..."

Tonight we’ll be hearing from:

Malcolm Still on The Crab and the Pufferfish: Applying OpenBSD’s Secure Software Design Pattern in Rust. From Malcolm:

"Mechanical Engineer by training, I've been writing rust professionally for 5 years. Currently a Senior Software Engineer at Swordbreaker protecting organisations from ransomware attacks."

Cosmo on Exploring a State-of-the-art Chess AI built with Rust. From Cosmo:

"Hi, I'm Cosmo, the author of Viridithas, a chess-playing program that competes at the highest level. Currently, I work at Esri, writing micro-services in Rust."

Rust and Friends (daytime coffee)

Welcome to Rust + Coffee 😀. This is intended as a choice for people who want to get together to chat/learn about Rust but can't make an evening session or just don't want to meet in a pub.

In June we're having a couple of events in the same week:

  • A daytime coffee event on Fri the 20th (this event)
  • An evening pub event on Thu the 19th (see other Meetup Event)

We had a great turn-out like last time, and ended up still a nice relaxed chat with interesting topics.

This is totally optional, but: it can be helpful to bring your laptop along if you'd like some help. There is no absolutely requirement to, but since this is during the day and in a cafe it makes a bit easier to do this.

Rust and Friends (evening pub)

In June we are once again having a couple of events in the same week:

  • An evening pub event on Thu 19th June (this event)
  • A daytime coffee event on Fri 20th June (see other Meetup Event)

Our intent is to cater to as wide a range of preferences as possible. Please choose the one that suits you the best!

Rust and Friends (daytime coffee)

Welcome to Rust + Coffee 😀. This is intended as a choice for people who want to get together to chat/learn about Rust but can't make an evening session or just don't want to meet in a pub.

In April we're having a couple of events in the same week:

  • A daytime coffee event on Fri the 25th (this event)
  • An evening pub event on Thu the 24th (see other Meetup Event)

We had a great turn-out last time, but ended up still a nice relaxed chat. This time we are trying a different venue (Machina Coffee); the last venue was great, but it's good to try out new places.

This is totally optional, but: it can be helpful to bring your laptop along if you'd like some help. There is no absolutely requirement to, but since this is during the day and in a cafe it makes a bit easier to do this.

Rust and Friends (evening pub)

In April we are once again having a couple of events in the same week:

  • An evening pub event on Thu 24th April (this event)
  • A daytime coffee event on Fri 25th April (see other Meetup Event)

Our intent is to cater to as wide a range of preferences as possible. Please choose the one that suits you the best!

March Talks! (Two)

It's time for some talks again! Tonight we'll be hearing from:

Chris Stafford on Escaping Node and React: Powering the web with Rust. From Chris:

"I've been writing web applications in Javascript since 1998, and I'm sick of it. React and server-side rendering is turning the web into an unmaintainable nightmare. Can Rust save us from ourselves? Possibly not, but maybe you can get an educational talk out of me trying it."

Hugo Tunius on Escaping coloured functions hell using inversion. From Hugo:

"Sync or Async? Tokio, Async-std, Smol, or Glommio? How about all of them? This talk will show you how to side-step these choices while writing code that is easier to test extend, and port across runtimes. Learn a design approach that frees your core logic from runtime dependencies, allowing you to leverage any ecosystem without getting locked in." "I stumbled upon Rust in 2017 and have been hooked ever since. For the last 3+ years I've been working professionally with Rust building live streaming infrastructure at Lookback."

Rust and Friends (daytime coffee)

(This is a rescheduled instance of the event we previously had planned for January but had to cancel due to weather warnings)

Welcome to Rust + Coffee 😀. This is intended as a choice for people who want to get together to chat/learn about Rust but can't make an evening session or just don't want to meet in a pub.

This is totally optional, but: it can be helpful to bring your laptop along if you'd like some help. There is no absolutely requirement to, but since this is during the day and in a cafe it makes a bit easier to do this.

(cancelled due to weather) Rust and Friends (daytime coffee)

This was cancelled due to weather warning

In January we're having a couple of events in the same week:

  • An evening pub event on Tue the 21st (see other Meetup Event)
  • A daytime coffee event on Fri the 24th (this event)

Our intent is to cater to as wide a range of preferences as possible. Please choose the one that suits you the best!

This is totally optional, but: it can be helpful to bring your laptop along if you'd like some help. There is no absolutely requirement to, but since this is during the day and in a cafe it makes a bit easier to do this.

Rust and Friends (evening pub)

In January we're having a couple of events in the same week:

  • An evening pub event on Tue the 21st (this event)
  • A daytime coffee event on Fri the 24th (see other Meetup Event)

Our intent is to cater to as wide a range of preferences as possible. Please choose the one that suits you the best!

Rust and Friends (pub)

Rust is growing, increasingly powered by its many and varied application areas. This group is about catering to the interests of people who just want to apply it, as well as those who want to learn more about the core language itself.

This is a small pub get-together on these themes. The intent is we at least have one of these every 2 months, occasionally interspersed / replaced with some talks.

Bootstrap Beers

It's been a while since we've gotten together, and I want to get us started in a way that makes this a going concern in 2024.

New to Rust? Wanting to be part of a local community of Rustaceans? Having some tricky issues that you're stuck on?

If any of these apply to you, then please come along!

Reasoning about Rust: an introduction to Rustdoc’s JSON format

An online talk from Luca Palmieri (see Speaker bio):

Macros are the primary mechanism for metaprogramming in Rust, either to perform code generation or enforce constraints at compile-time that are not easily captured by the type system (e.g. sqlx).

Macros are also limited: their input is a stream of tokens, with no type-level information.

Up until last year, you had to hook directly into the compiler internals to get a more featureful representation. This is no longer the case, thanks to Rustdoc’s JSON format: an information-rich representation of your Rust API in a machine-parsable format (with a versioned schema!).

We will introduce the feature, look at the structure of the data and cover a few of the usecases where it shines. You will leave the talk with a basic understanding of the format and ideas on how you could leverage it to build tools that enhance your own Rust workflows.

Speaker Bio

Luca Palmieri builds technology products for a living, and has been doing so for a while. His current focus is on backend development, software architecture and the Rust programming language.

He currently works at MainMatter as a Principal Engineering Consultant. He partners with teams across the industry to make sure they succeed in adopting or scaling their Rust usage, where it makes sense to do so. He was formerly at AWS and TrueLayer.

He has been part of the Rust community since 2018 and is best known as the author of “Zero to Production in Rust”, an introduction to using Rust for backend development.

When he is not coding, you’ll find him baking cakes or rolling pasta sheets.

December Talks + Rust Book Raffle

Something for people just getting started as well as wanting to go a bit deeper:

We also gave away a free copy of the excellent "Zero To Production In Rust" by Luca Palmieri which is also a great book for getting started in your journey with Rust.

We were generously hosted this evening within Huawei's Edinburgh Research Centre, where David works in the Programming Languages Group.

Rust Night June

Rust Night March

Rust Night December

Rust Night September

Rust Night July

Applying Rust to your day job (includes Special Guests)

Rust was pretty hot around then, with many big names putting their support behind it. We asked: Is Rust now "Crossing the Chasm"? More pragmatically, how can we best apply it in our day jobs?

In this Meetup we heard from these Special Guests who've successfully applied Rust in their own companies:

We also opened it up for general Q/A about how we might get the best out of Rust ourselves.

Rust Night June

Rust Coffee Morning, June

We were trying out some face-to-face Meetups, for pretty-open chats about anything Rust or Rust-related.

This one is a "coffee morning"

Rust in the Polymesh Project

This was presented by Vladimir Komendantskiy.

Polymesh is a blockchain for financial securities. It is built on the Substrate framework written in Rust. Around this time the valuation of all projects built on top of Substrate reached $5 billion.

Vladimir described what blockchain securities are and gave examples of operations on them in Rust: settlement, corporate actions, and confidential transactions.

He showed how a WASM runtime can be constructed on Substrate and how it is upgraded on the fly without restarting the network nodes. He talked about the zero-knowledge cryptography behind confidential transactions (MERCAT) and showed smart contracts written in Ink! (a Rust-based DSL).

Fluence: interface-types for server-side WebAssembly modules

This was presented by Mikhail Voronov.

The Fluence Compute Engine is intended to run multi-module WebAssembly applications with a shared-nothing linking scheme and with interface-types support.

This talk focussed on:

  • Why the interface-types proposal is essential for all ecosystems using WASM
  • Why Rust is one of the most suitable languages for any projects using WASM
  • The FCE architecture itself
  • Support for interface-types in the Fluence Rust SDK .

Audio Anywhere

This was presented by Benedict Gaster.

Benedict talked about "Audio Anywhere", a framework for working with audio plugins that are compiled once and run anywhere. He introduced a desktop example; including the use of Faust for DSP, lightweight Web-views for GUIs, and Rust as a hosting language.

At the heart of Audio Anywhere is an audio engine whose Digital Signal Processing (DSP) components are written in Faust and deployed with WebAssembly.

He described his groups modifications to the Faust compiler, utilizing Rust as an intermediate language to provide access to auto-vectorization of WebAssembly (128-SIMD). A number of example modules were discussed, demonstrating the utility of the framework.

Rust Overlaps: Web Assembly (WASM)

Rust Overlaps: where Rust isn't essential but is a key enabler. This time: doing fun things with WASM. This was a short intro to Web Assembly (WASM) followed by a few presenters from the community going over their own experiences of using Rust and WASM together.

Pirrigator - Growing Tomatoes Free From Memory Errors and Race

This was presented by Neil Gall:

"My experience learning Rust to build an embedded control system. A quick tour of the technologies used, the problems overcome and my experience diving into the Rust ecosystem for the first time to build a Raspberry Pi powered greenhouse irrigator - dubbed Pirrigator - resulting in a fine crop of tomatoes guaranteed free from race conditions and memory errors."

The Outs and Ins of the new MongoDB Rust Driver

This was presented by Mark Smith:

"MongoDB have been working hard on adding Rust as a fully supported client language for MongoDB, and the new driver reached beta this month. Mark Smith will run you through the basics of how to use it and how it was developed, including (maybe) interesting techniques used to support tokio, async-std and non-async programming approaches"

February Impl Night #2

This was small, and structured as an "Impl Night".

People brought along any work in progress or anything they'd like help with. This was at any level. Mike and other peers were there to help; so that we could work through any problems together.

February Impl Night #1

This was small, and structured as an "Impl Night".

People brought along any work in progress or anything they'd like help with. This was at any level. Mike and other peers were there to help; so that we could work through any problems together.

Rust Edinburgh Meetup #3

Speakers:

  • "How MaidSafe is using Rust for peer-to-peer networking on the SAFE Network" by Spandan Sharma, MaidSafe Engineer
  • "Improving Ethereum consensus" by Vladimir Komendantskiy, POA Network

Hosted by Codeplay and sponsored by MaidSafe.

Rust Edinburgh Meetup #2 - Networking Mixer

Hanging out at the pub.

Rust Edinburgh Meetup #1

Speakers:

  • "RLS and You" by Mark Sta Ana
  • "How Rust gets polymorphism right" by Simon Brand, Codeplay Software Ltd

Hosted by Codeplay and sponsored by MaidSafe.

About Us

Rust is growing, increasingly powered by its many and varied application areas. This "Rust and Friends" group is about catering to the interests of people who just want to apply it, as well as those who want to learn more about the core language itself.

For a taste of what to expect, see some of our past talks (Youtube), but also see areas we'll hope to cover, like Gaming / Web / ML/AI / Data / Guis.

We believe the Rust language and community can benefit anyone regardless of their level of ability or prior experience. "Rust and Friends" is a local / online Meetup intended to help us achieve that goal. We also have a #rust channel on the Scottish Technology Club Discord server.

For all meetings and interactions we follow Rust Lang Code of Conduct.

History

The Meetup was originally started in 2017 (it's believed this was by members of Codeplay and MaidSafe). These Meetups ran through 2018, but there was then a hiatus.

In 2020, the Meetup was taken over by Matt and Mike when the main Meetup group lost an owner. They managed to get a couple of Implementation Nights under their belt, but unbeknownst to them, this was on the cusp of COVID. So, they had to switch quickly to online only.

During 2021/2022, most of the Meetups were opportunistic Beer Evenings / Coffee Mornings with the occasional online Meetup. It was hard to predict when venues would be available or advisable.

In 2022, their was more interest in community in meeting up physically, and also some availability of venues, so we ended the year with our first physical talk since 2018!

Kinds of Meetup

Presentations / Discussions:
Focussed on particular topics. Sometimes hosted, sometimes online. These sometimes appear on our YouTube channel.
Beer / Coffee get-togethers:
Simple get-togethers for the community to chat about Rust and related topics.
Implementation Nights:
People bring along any work in progress or anything they'd like help with. Peers are there to help, so that we could work through any problems together.