Interest Group Roundtable Minutes

• Not so much as a presentation about what working groups are
• Goal of these disussions to promote collaboration between interest groups and Rust teams
• It's been interesting to see that interest groups have different problems from one another
• Have some starter questions, but also looking for people who have particular questions to raise them
• Forest A, game dev
• Adam Greig, embedded
  • most of the work is maintaining a set of core crates
  • help to coordinate and aid in collaboration
  • in principle, help to enable needs to embedded users with Rust teams, but that hasn't happened as much
  • maintain various books and things for people new to embedded and new to Rust
• Tony Arcieri, cryptography
  • organize on Rust Crypto Interest Group with Ernest
  • work on rust-sec vulnerability database
  • within purview of Rust Crypto, work on the nuts and bolts things
  • found people were working in silos, impetus was to solve some cross-functional problems, maybe a bit of trying to brainstorm how we could improve lang for cryptography
• Ricky Hosfelt, ML IG
  • saw the need for an interest group, because ecosystem was pretty fractured
  • ML IG took over "Luca" crate (?)
  • writing a book
  • maintain arewelearningyet.com (answer is still no)
  • finding the areas of machine learning where we need to lay groundwork
• Looking at communities…where does community gather?
• in gamedev, focus a lot of different Discord servers
  • e.g. bevy, amethyst engine have their own discord servers
  • but also have a central hub: a github org where overarching issues can be discussed
• ml?
  • organized mostly on Zulip, which has worked out well, can have channels
  • people are subscribed to a default set
  • once every other week have a Zoom call around roughly 2pm Eastern time, which matches European times well
  • Zulip stream is a place to meet and talk, coordinate meetings
  • One big thing is people post links about crates, articles, etc, and decide whether to put them on arewelearningyet.com
    • Zulip works well to manage that kind of async work
  • Forest: one thing I find interesting is that a lot of the goal is gaining knowledge together, moving things to arewelearningyet, would you say that's the best way for people to get into ML in rust?
    • Ricky: I'd say that's a good place to get started and learn what exists in Rust
    • Org-wise, we also have a github group
  • forest: interesting about scheduling meetings, we've had some areas of the world (e.g. Russian group) break off and find a time
• crypto
  • The RCIG has been doing monthly sync meetings for about the past few months
  • In terms of the wider community, Rust is this sleeper language that came in and dominated crypto space
  • I go to a lot of crypto conferences, conferences on Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and over the past 5 years there's been a cohort of people doing things with crypto that wouldn't be possible without Rust
  • But crypto people often do things in silos and don't discuss general state of Rust crypto so much as crypto overall
  • Ernest: felt like there was a need for cross-polination, that was our mandate
  • Making sure there was an apex point, where people leave their agendas at the door, and we work towards forming up this part of the Rust ecosystem
  • This is where the "sync up" calls come in
  • Doing blue-sky thinking about what we want to see done, how we can work together to make that happen
  • Look and take inspiration from other groups
• Forest: interesting to hear about the agility that comes up with an interest group
  • with game-dev wg, since there are so many parties, there is the common interest around game dev, but hard to coordinate and move in a large forward direction
• embedded: community
  • like game dev, it's harder to bring everyone together
  • reasonably large group, maybe 40 members, people pull in different directions
  • use matrix almost exclusively
  • have a weekly meeting over matrix, 8pm Berlin time
  • used to be strutured, we were writing a book, planning that work
  • but these days it tends to be more open-ended, discussing issues on crates and things, specific issues being nominated for discussion
  • as number of people doing embedded in rust has gotten bigger, the specific responsibilities of the wg have gotten smaller; more concerned about maintaining crates and backwards compat, feeling less pressure to solve specific problems
  • have a github org and teams maintaining sets of crates
  • at some points we had teams create wishlists and goals they wanted to accomplish
    • what have embedded users said they are missing
    • e.g. a real time operating system :)
  • but that's slowed down, most of the dev is happening outside the working group
  • lots of projects flourishing that aren't maintained directly within the group
• problems experienced by interest groups
  • game-dev:
    • one of the bigger problems is compilation time
    • for example, bevy has specific instructions for how to get faster compilaton times
  • crypto:
    • don't really feel we need to make language changes, but there are some that would be helpful, though we don't expect them to get solved any time soon
    • need some kind of "minimum viable property" to have a constant time code, figuring out what that has to touch, but it intersects all layers (e.g., LLVM)
    • one of them would be how to get "CMOV" (branching in constant time)
  • embedded:
    • not compilation time
    • corner cases in the memory model
    • twice we've discovered that the fundamental thing we use across the operating system is unsound
    • tricky as they require a lot of domain expertise
    • many different types of embedded users:
      • hobbyists, who need really easy things to get going
      • people who need safety critical stuff
      • helping both of those groups share same resources is hard
    • so many kinds of hardware, supporting all of them is very hard
  • machine learning:
    • one challenge has been organizing people who know ML and people who know Rust and be able to have them communicate
    • haven't hit too many rust issues
    • compilation time wise, people who do ML, are used to training models
  • crypto:
    • one thing that would be nice is some "first class" way to ensure that Rust is panic free
    • saw some techniques there like prusti
• niko: wondering about coherent things, is it just cataloging all the things?
  • ricky: for ML, people are moving very fast, people tend to want to be on the forefront, not so much building the basics
  • forest: for getting started, there are really cool engines, but a similar dynamic happens sometimes
  • crypto: it's something we're trying to feel out and solve. When I go to meetups, people ask "what should I use for "Rust crypto" but there's not really a good resource.
    • We have a giant list of crates but I'm not sure how helpful that is.
    • "ring has been fairly popular" is probably the right answer
    • but it's generally an unsolved problem
    • curious how folks have put together a "new to rust" guide thing
  • embedded:
    • a long time back we wrote this "discovery book" that is specific to a particular board
    • basically a long tutorial that introduces a lot of embedded + rust concepts
    • good, but the book is starting to get out of date
    • one challenge is that when people get to the end, it's like "great you're up to the start of the art 3 years ago"
    • we're not getting more and more async stuff in rust, but we have no tutorials about that whatsoever
    • now an effort to update this book using modern hardware, programs, etc
• forest:
  • I was reviewing a book by the author of this RLTK (Rogue-like toolkit) and intrigued by the idea that a lot of the tech was being used may quickly fall out of date
    • locking down on a 2-year-old version of Rust will miss out
  • but it still helps you to get you started
• tony, crypto:
  • I hope the landscape is pretty good today if you are trying to use standard algorithms
  • One of the questions was "what are the boss crates", but there are so many crates, trying not to bless anything yet
  • A lot of very cool stuff happening right now, if you see gaps, please let me know, I could probably point you at something
• forest:
  • interesting to see the contrast between the various groups
  • might be nice to have a newsletter grouping together updates from the various interest group ecosystems