This program is tentative and subject to change.

Mon 21 Oct 2024 16:30 - 17:30 at Pacific C - Session 4 Chair(s): Tobias Wrigstad

Rust has succeeded in breaking ownership out of academia. Yet, while there is a thriving community of Rust programmers, mounting evidence shows that Rust’s ownership model still poses a serious barrier to adoption both for new and experienced developers. This is an instance of a more general problem: when you invent a fancy type system, how are you supposed to teach it to people? In this talk, I will describe our method of improving the pedagogy of Rust’s type system. Specifically, we (a) investigated why developers struggle with ownership, (b) developed a new way to visualize how Rust’s ownership analyzer “sees” a program, and (c) integrated this visualization into a new pedagogy of ownership that can explain phenomena like soundness vs. completeness and field-sensitivity to the typical Rust learner. We evaluated this approach through a large-scale field deployment into a popular online Rust textbook, finding that the pedagogy improved learning outcomes by roughly one letter grade on an exam of difficult ownership-related questions.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Mon 21 Oct

Displayed time zone: Pacific Time (US & Canada) change

16:00 - 17:30
Session 4IWACO at Pacific C
Chair(s): Tobias Wrigstad Uppsala University
16:00
30m
Talk
The First Six Years in the Development of Polonius, an Improved Borrow Checker
IWACO
Amanda Stjerna Uppsala university
16:30
60m
Keynote
Visualizing and Explaining Rust's Ownership Model
IWACO
Will Crichton Brown University