CSE 5349: The Rust Programming Language: Research Challenges and Opportunities

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The Rust Programming Language is a good read and will teach you Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

Some research papers:
- Safe systems programming in Rust: The promise and the challenge (CACM’20) https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3418295 -- nice intro to Rust's ownership model with good examples
- Understanding Memory and Thread Safety Practices and Issues in Real-World Rust Programs (PLDI’20) https://songlh.github.io/paper/rust-study.pdf -- interesting and informative read that assumes less knowledge than other study papers
- Blog about memory management in Rust https://blog.akquinet.de/2020/10/09/yes-rust-has-garbage-collection-and-a-fast-one/ -- intuitive read, but is somewhat imprecise about the meaning of garbage collection
- System Programming in Rust: Beyond Safety (HotOS'17) https://www.ics.uci.edu/~aburtsev/doc/crust-hotos17.pdf -- using Rust for isolation, information flow control, and checkpointing
- Corundum: Statically-Enforced Persistent Memory Safety (ASPLOS'21) http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mhoseinzadeh/hoseinzadeh-corundum-asplos21.pdf -- Corundum is a Rust library (crate) that supports persistent memory (PM) programming and enforces not only memory safety but also PM-specific correctness properties.
- Demo: VRLifeTime -- An IDE Tool to Avoid Concurrency and
Memory Bugs in Rust (CCS'20 demo) https://songlh.github.io/paper/vr.pdf -- looks interesting

Try to participate in every discussion, but not so much that others have trouble participating. Quality counts more than quantity. Take risks. It's okay to be "wrong."

You're encouraged to discuss papers in small groups with your classmates prior to our in-class discussion.

Discussion leaders should prepare to lead the class in a discussion of the paper's most interesting points. Note that the discussion is not a presentation, i.e., it's not like a conference talk. Everyone has already read the paper. That said, these papers are hard and will have material that's new to most of us, so as much as half of the discussion time should be spent leading discussion of challenging points in the paper. The rest of the time should be spent leading discussion of questions or topics that go beyond just understanding the paper's key points, such as discussing strengths, weaknesses, connections to related work, and opportunities/challenges/ideas for future work.

Please understand that Mike will hijack discussion periodically to make sure that certain points are part of the discussion and understood by the class.

It's not necessary to have slides, but slides can be helpful to put up a few diagrams from the paper (or conference talk), and to display your discussion questions. (The room has a Windows PC and an HDMI cable for a personal laptop, and Mike has a USB-C to HDMI converter.) It's often a good idea to draw on the board during a discussion.

You may obtain the authors' slides if you like, but don't just use these slides (they will cause you to give a presentation rather than lead a discussion). It's okay to copy-paste diagrams from the slides to aid discussions. It's also okay to just copy-paste diagrams from the paper's PDF. Give appropriate credit on your slides (either throughout or on the first slide of your slides).

If you're a paper's discussion leader, send your discussion notes and questions (can be slides but definitely don't need to be) to Mike by private Piazza post by 24 hours before the in-class discussion, so he can give you feedback. You're welcome to ask questions or ask for feedback much sooner than that, e.g., if you have questions after reading the papers but before starting to work on discussion topics.

35% class participation
15% leading in-class discussions
50% project

We should all be respectful of everyone else's questions, comments, and opinions.

To get help, you're encouraged to attend office hours or post to Piazza. Make your Piazza question public unless it needs to be private. (If you send Mike e-mail or a private Piazza post that could be public, he'll ask you to make a new public Piazza post.)

To avoid distracting yourself, your fellow students, and Mike, please do the following:
- Arrive on time to class (Mike plans to start and end class exactly on time).
- Put phones away and silence them and keep them put away.
- Only use laptops and tablets for improving in-class discussion. Otherwise, or if they're going to distract you, put them away.

Please contact Mike as early as possible so he can help make reasonable accommodations.

Representing someone else's work as your own is a seriously violation of academic integrity.

If you receive help from any source, you must explicitly acknowledge the source and nature of the help (i.e., add a written note on the paper or presentation). If the help seems unreasonable, you might lose some credit, but there won't be any academic integrity consequences, since you acknowledged the help you received.

Mike is obligated by University Rules to report any suspected violation to the Committee on Academic Misconduct (COAM). COAM decides whether a violation has occurred and, if so, what the penalty will be, which can include a failing grade and suspension or dismissal from the University.