Past Meetups

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.


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 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 .

This will be an online meetup using Google Meet. Please feel free to ask questions in the chat, and we will collate these for Q/A at the end of the talk. (Image credit: )


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 Conditions

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 #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

We believe the Rust language and community can benefit anyone regardless of their level of ability or prior experience. "Rust Edinburgh" is a local / online Meetup intended to help us achieve that goal locally.

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

See our YouTube channel for some past meetings, and this page for extra information. Please join our Meetup group if you're interested in attending future meetings.

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 Evenings / Coffee Mornings:
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.