Strange Loop

rustc in userland

A neat feature of rust's compiler architecture is that all of it's internals are present in a rustc install- meaning that unlike nearly any other AOT compiled language, you get all the machinery to parse source code, transform, and emit object files from userland code. This offers you a lot of scope for implementing two types of tools that traditionally have had little language/standard library support: Static analysis tools, and compilers.

This talk will dive into the machinery that rust offers you to do this, as a side effect of the compiler's modularity. Covered will be writing a simple static analyser (distinct from the macro, and compiler plugin infrastructure); which is unfortunately rust specific and comparitively uninteresting. Following up, we'll demonstrate how to write Rust programs that excercise the Rust codegen machinery at runtime, to implement a simple LISP that emits native objects using rust's packaging machinery. Finally we'll dive into some more platform specific hacks that can be used to fake out a JIT compiler using these techniques.

Richo Healey

Stripe

Richo likes his ducks flat and his instruction sets reduced. Currently a Security Engineer at Stripe, richo's disdain for computers has been fueled by his career across security, distributed systems, operations and development. At night, he dons a scarf (capes are so last year) and writes open source code to distract him from security research.