Mon 21 Oct 2024 14:00 - 15:00 at Pacific B - Session 3 Chair(s): Aleksander Boruch-Gruszecki

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.

Mon 21 Oct

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

14:00 - 15:30
Session 3IWACO at Pacific B
Chair(s): Aleksander Boruch-Gruszecki Charles University
14:00
60m
Keynote
Visualizing and Explaining Rust's Ownership Model
IWACO
Will Crichton Brown University
File Attached
15:00
30m
Talk
Ordered Types for Typestate
IWACO
Peter Thiemann University of Freiburg, Germany