Identifying Barriers to Adoption for Rust through Online Discourse

Zeng, Anna; Crichton, Will

doi:10.4230/oasics.plateau.2018.5

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…In response to the reports of learners' struggles with ownership [Fulton et al 2021;The Rust Survey Team 2020;Zeng and Crichton 2019;, researchers have explored several ways to help Rust users deal with ownership. For instance, Coblenz et al [2022] showed that garbage collection can help users avoid ownership issues and thereby complete a coding task more quickly.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This rosy picture of PL tech transfer belies a persistent obstacle: teaching ownership types to prospective users. Over the last four years, studies have found that Rust learners struggle to fix ownership type errors [Zeng and Crichton 2019;, and users self-report that ownership is among their biggest barriers to learning Rust [Fulton et al 2021;The Rust Survey Team 2020]. To wit: advances in the technical factors of type systems require commensurate advances in the human factors of type systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Grounded Conceptual Model for Ownership Types in Rust

Crichton,

Gray,

Krishnamurthi

2023

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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Programmers learning Rust struggle to understand ownership types, Rust’s core mechanism for ensuring memory safety without garbage collection. This paper describes our attempt to systematically design a pedagogy for ownership types. First, we studied Rust developers’ misconceptions of ownership to create the Ownership Inventory, a new instrument for measuring a person’s knowledge of ownership. We found that Rust learners could not connect Rust’s static and dynamic semantics, such as determining why an ill-typed program would (or would not) exhibit undefined behavior. Second, we created a conceptual model of Rust’s semantics that explains borrow checking in terms of flow-sensitive permissions on paths into memory. Third, we implemented a Rust compiler plugin that visualizes programs under the model. Fourth, we integrated the permissions model and visualizations into a broader pedagogy of ownership by writing a new ownership chapter for The Rust Programming Language , a popular Rust textbook. Fifth, we evaluated an initial deployment of our pedagogy against the original version, using reader responses to the Ownership Inventory as a point of comparison. Thus far, the new pedagogy has improved learner scores on the Ownership Inventory by an average of 9

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%