The C Programming language is used incredibly widely today. Its echoes can be felt throughout the programming space, from the basic syntax we use to the underpinnings of all modern computing. C has been used to write programming languages, operating systems, and everything in between.

But we live in a world full of malicious actors, and C (and C++) are so close to the metal you can burn yourself easily. Heartbleed, Shellshock, Stagefright, Rowhammer, Spectre, Meltdown. So many security vulnerabilities come from C's (entirely reasonable at the time) decision to force you to manually allocate and free memory.

Rust is a new (by C's standards) programming language, known for its friendly and welcoming community, first class ecosystem, and for eliminating entire categories of bugs like these without sacrificing performance.

In this talk, we'll take a fairly high level look at those three parts of the Rust language. We'll talk about how the community has diversity and inclusion as core beliefs, and the many ways you can get help or get in touch. We'll talk about Rust's best in breed ecosystem: cargo, the dependency manager; rustup, the language version manager; rls, the smart language server; and clippy, the linter. And finally we'll talk about how Rust eliminates race conditions and the need for manual memory management without introducing a garbage collector and sacrificing its blazing fast performance.

Target Audience: Developers, especially those who currently work on anything performance sensitive.