Day 4 -
Aug 21st
Panorama
Keynote: What's the deal with unsafe Rust?
Rust is primarily known for its ownership-based type system that enables a low-level programming paradigm in a type-safe language. However, another key pillar of Rust is its treatment of unsafe code: while most languages tend to shun unsafe operations, often leaving them poorly specified, Rust gives unsafe operations a lot of attention, from a dedicated syntax to documentation and community norms. In this talk, I will explain this often-misunderstood aspect of Rust by talking about what unsafe Rust is, why it exists, how it is used, and how tooling and formal methods help mitigate the inherent risks of using unsafe operations.
Ralf Jung
Keynote Speaker
Ralf Jung is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where he leads the Programming Language Foundations Lab within the Institute for Programming Languages and Systems. His research focuses on formal methods for programming languages, particularly Rust and the Iris framework for concurrent separation logic. Jung’s work aims to provide rigorous mathematical foundations to ensure software reliability and security. He has made significant contributions to Rust’s formal verification, including the development of the RustBelt project and the Miri tool for detecting undefined behavior in unsafe Rust code. His efforts have been recognized with several awards, such as the ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential POPL Paper Award in 2025 for his work on Iris.
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