Ben Williamson
Ben's background spans embedded development, safety-critical systems, browser security, network security and cryptographic protocols. He left Apple in 2024, having worked on autonomous systems, iCloud Keychain sync protocols, and a Rust implementation of IPsec that secures network traffic across Apple's data centres. He has trained hundreds of engineers and helped multiple teams to adopt and deploy Rust at scale.
Session
C and C++ are awesome / terrible – they let you do whatever you want with pointers, resulting in all the tasty memory corruption vulnerabilities we know and love. Other languages impose a runtime or garbage collection, which tends to disqualify them from systems programming, embedded firmware and performance-critical applications. Rust seems like a magical best-of-both-worlds:
- Guaranteed memory safety and thread safety
- Performance and control equivalent to C and C++
- Suitable for firmware and kernels, with no runtime or garbage collection
How does it do that? In this talk we reinvent Rust's concept of Ownership, which enables it to make these guarantees at compile-time.