The Conference

EuroRust 2024 was a 2-day conference taking place in Vienna on the 10th and 11th of October. I am far from being a Rust expert, but I'm generally interested in the language, so I was happy that my employer gave me the chance to attend this conference.

Before giving my feedback on the sessions and speakers, here are a few general observations regarding the conference:

• The conference website was quite bad. It did not even have a basic navigation menu which you would expect from basically every website today. It simply was a long single page that you had to scroll through from top to bottom, each time you wanted to e.g. check the schedule. Why?

• The check-in process was not great either. I had to queue for almost 30(!) minutes on the first day before I got in. Every attendee had digital passes that only had to be scanned before receiving their badge. This should not take long. However, they made you fill out the badge by hand with your details before they would scan and let in the next person. This caused quite the delay. Again: why?

• The food was horrible - there's simply no other word to describe it. I'm on the train on my way home from the conference and still feeling queasy from the crap we had to eat there.

• The venue was OK. It was some former factory compound which fit nicely into the whole iron and steel theme of Rust. The big disadvantage was that it was really far from the city center and there was nothing around it (in terms of food e.g.).

• The conference had some nice gimmicks though. There was e.g. the HULKs RoboCup SPL Team with their football robots present.

The Sessions

The conference had a main and a side track. Most of the sessions that I watched happened on the main track, This was mainly because of the session topics, but also due to the fact that the side track had very limited seats and I didn't bother standing.

All the sessions had to fit into 30 minute slots, which I think is too short for technical presentations. Given the additional fact that all speakers tried to finish up within 25 minutes to allow for Q&A made this even worse.

Fewer, but longer, sessions would have been "more" here.

On top of that, many of the speakers seemed rather unexperienced or were simply not great at presenting. This resulted in many poor quality sessions that were either completely superficial or super fast "walkthroughs" through walls of code. Hardly any of the speakers managed to structure their talk well or tell an interesting story.

Here's the rating system that I applied to the sessions I had watched:

| - | - | | 👍 | Recommendation. Go and watch it. | | 🤷‍♂️ | The session was "meh". You can watch it, but won't miss anything. | | 👎 | Stinker. Don't waste your time with it. | | 🥇 | My favorite session. | | 🥈 | My second favorite. | | 🥉 | My third favorite. |

Day 1

Through the Fire and the Flames - Jon Gjengset

👍

I had actually expected some kind of keynote session here to open the conference, but this was really just a regular, but interesting session. Jon Gjengset presented a couple of Rust concepts which newcomers to the language typically struggle with. It was a well-structured, didactically interesting talk that suffered from the 30 minute time limit though.

Build bigger in less time: code testing beyond the basics - Predrag Gruevski

👎

This talk about testing was quite disappointing. It was not really Rust-specific and everyone who has already spent a thought or two on testing, has probably reached the same conclusions that were presented here.

A gentle introduction to procedural macros - Sam Van Overmeire

👎

I expected a lot from this talk but was very disappointed. The talk was structured badly and diving unnecessarily deep without giving good use cases or motivation in the first place. If you were deep into procedural macros already, it was probably nothing new. For the rest of us, it was too much, too fast.

Practical Rust for Web Audio - Attila Haraszti

🤷‍♂️

This was a solid, but superficial session on using Rust for Web Audio. More detail would have been interesting, but again, the constraint time was probably an issue here.

Powerful Macros, Good IDE Support, No Headaches. Choose Two. - Lukas Wirth

🤷‍♂️

This was the second time this day I wanted to learn about macros. While this talk was clearly an improvement over the previous macro talk, it suffered from some of the same problems. The talk went technically deep quickly, without providing good structure or a common thread for the less experienced audience.

The Impact of Memory Allocators on Performance: A Deep Dive - Arthur Pastel

🤷‍♂️

This was a solid talk by the founder of codspeed (a conference sponsor), comparing the performance of different memory allocators.

Proving Macro Expansion with expandable - Sasha Pourcelot

🤷‍♂️

Macros are obviously a big topic in the Rust community. This session was about the efforts of verifying that a Macro is syntactically correct. The speaker presented different approaches they tried to achieve that resulting in the expandable crate they create for this.

Runtime Scripting for Rust Applications - Niklas Korz

👍

This talk was about how to embed scripting engines in a Rust application. The speaker gave a good overview of the available scripting engines and the approaches they had tried. It would have been interesting to see more practical applications here but the short time slot was probably again the limiting factor here.

Day 2

The First Six Years in the Development of Polonius, an Improved Borrow Checker - Amanda Stjerna

👍

As the title suggested, the session was about the journey towards a new borrow checker in Rust. Even though the topic was highly academical, it was well prepared and it was simply interesting to get insights on such a huge endeavor.

Non-Binary Rust: Between Safe and Unsafe - Boxy Uwu

👎

This was by far the worst session of this conference. It had no structure no narrative and the speaker had no presentation skills whatsoever. What seemed like a really promising and interesting topic turned out to be a complete waste of time.

Writing an SD Card Driver in Rust - Jonathan Pallant

👍🥇

This session was my absolute highlight. A low-level, but tangible topic, sprinkled with a bit of history and retro-computing. Paired with a good narrative and excellent presentation skills - that's the content I want to see when I attend a conference!

My Journey from WebDev to Medical Visualization Rustacean - David Peherstorfer

🤷‍♂️

As the title suggests, this talk was mainly about the presenters personal journey as a developer. The talk was well structured and covered different frameworks and technologies he had used along his way. In the end, it was a bit too superficial and I would have preferred a bit more technical and hands-on insights.

Renaissance of Terminal User Interfaces with Rust - Orhun Parmaksız

👍🥈

This talk was right down my alley. I have a thing for TUIs (textual user interfaces) that is probably partly nostalgic. But I still appreciate the elegance and simplicity of those. Ratatui - the framework he presented - seems incredibly advanced and I'm looking forward to giving it a try.

Windows Kernel Programming with Rust - Matthias Heiden

👍🥉

This was the last session I attended in this conference and it was a worthy ending for me. The talk was very well structured and had a great narrative. Given the speakers young age, I was quite impressed by his presentation skills. Talking about Windows Kernel driver development in an approachable and comprehensible way is not easy task, but he did a fantastic job.

Wrapping it up

All in all, I would have expected a bit more from this conference. I don't feel like it made me a better Rust programmer, which was kind of what I had expected from attending. I might have brushed up a bit on the whole Rust ecosystem, but even that is behind my expectations. A lot of these sessions felt like attending a Meetup, where people get the chance to present and talk about their favorite topic for the first time. The conference simply lacked professionalism, and having to follow talks without a good structure or narrative is simply tiring. A couple of good sessions made up for that, but in general I did not enjoy the conference's format and would not recommend it.