On 06/21/2013 11:50 AM, David Evans wrote:
I'm developing a new operating systems course that I'll teach this
fall. I haven't taught operating systems before, so have a lot of
flexibility in developing the course, but mainly I want to give
students experience with lower-level systems programming,
understanding of OS concepts including resource management,
concurrency, and security.
I don't have much experience with Rust yet, but from what I've seen it
seems like a great language to use for this.
Does anyone know of any other efforts to use Rust in teaching, or have
any advice on this? I would welcome any suggestions or pointers to
resources that might be useful for this (or caveats if people think
Rust is not ready/appropriate to use for an undergraduate course now?)
I agree Rust would be great for presenting these issues since it is
designed to make the programmer understand the costs of abstractions,
but it also doesn't punish them for making errors in the various ways
that C does. I totally want this to happen but at this stage basing a
university course around Rust would be risky; I don't know anybody
teaching Rust so you would be way out on a limb.
I can imagine that students taking a systems-programming course based
around Rust would have to spend a fair bit of time learning how to cope
with Rust's novel semantics (affine types in particular). Hopefully
those hurdles would still be easier than managing the unsafety of C. Of
course there's also the risk of frustrating students with the large
number of compiler bugs still present in rustc.
Not sure how useful they are for preparing a course, but Tim posted his
recent tutorial [slides], and there are some other slide decks floating
around.
[slides]: http://catamorphism.org/Writing/Rust-Tutorial-tjc.pdf
Sorry this isn't so helpful, but I'm happy to offer any further assistance.
Regards,
Brian
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