By James Laird | Reporter
Dr. Andrew Freeman is a first year assistant professor of computer science at Baylor University and has introduced a new and unique aspect to his computer networking course. In this course instead of using C++, Python or Java programming languages, Freeman has integrated one called Rust.
Rust is a modern, memory-safe programming language that is faster than Python and C++ and addresses the other language’s security vulnerabilities, according to Freeman.
“In this networking course students really are taught to understand performance critical concerns with sending data,” Freeman said. “So you want every single step in the chain to be really, really fast because if any one step is slow then your connection is going to be slow and your experience using the internet for any purpose is not going to be very good.”
Integrating Rust into this course has been a breaking of the norm as most computer networking classes use C and C++, which he believes are starting to show their drawbacks.
“So the big [drawback] is that they are not memory safe, and memory safety relates to the suite of potential errors or problems that can happen when your program is executing so they’re prone to crashes, to security vulnerabilities,” Freeman said. “Because of that, it’s a lot easier to make mistakes as a programmer when you’re writing in C or C++. So Rust is a much more modern language that basically fixes those problems with these older languages.”
Freeman said that one of the big reasons he made the switch to Rust in his course was because he believes that it forces students to think more like a computer by figuring out potential problems and change and improve the way they write their code.
“I think one of the advantages to Rust is it really helps students to remold their brain –– it really makes you think like a computer a lot more,” Freeman said. “So by design, it forces you to tackle problems in a new way and I think that’s really good for students and gives them a deeper understanding of what is actually happening under the hood.”
Freeman said a unique aspect of Rust is that it sets students apart in a competitive tech job market and also prepares them for the workforce.
“It’s pretty tough out there for students right now. There’s a lot of competition for not too many jobs compared to how things were like three or four years ago,” Freeman said. “But in the short term, anything you can do to set your application apart from every other fresh college graduate is going to be helpful. And so I think that learning a unique language that actually is getting a lot of adoption in the industry is going to help with that process.”
Dallas senior Tristan Brown credits Freeman and the integration of Rust in helping him with the computer networking class and making it more understandable.
“There’s lots of top languages that we use that everyone knows, Java, Python, C++ … but in order to be very flexible, sometimes you have to be put onto projects and you don’t know how to use that code,” Brown said. “You have to be able to basically apply that format of previous languages into new languages.”
Brown also said that Freeman’s use of Rust in his teaching also forced him to learn the material and not just cram for a test and lose all the material afterwards.
“I felt like that was way more beneficial because I could go in asking questions. I could take things much slower,” Brown said. “I wasn’t rushed to quickly go and memorize this stuff while also doing programs at the same time.”
Freeman said the future of Rust is bright and he expects to see it applied in both the industry and academia more and more down the road.
“I just know that for me, it’s the most useful language for my research,” Freeman said. “It’s going to be the most useful language for a lot of work that people could do. So it’s only going to get more common I think.”
