I’m thinking about proposing a talk for ROSCON about why roboticists and the ROS community should care about Rust and the current state of using Rust with ROS 2.
I think there are amazing advantages to the Rust programming languages and that there are many cases where you can use it today in ROS 2 projects where the benefits of using it greatly outweigh the difficulty of using a language that is not as supported as C++ or Python.
I’m unsure if this sort of talk would appeal to those going to ROSCON so I’m making this post here to ask before submitting a talk proposal.
I’d say go for it! No need to ask the community, and if your proposal gets rejected, submit again next year However, you might want to contact each of the Rust-related projects in case they have any feedback or they plan to submit a talk themselves.
From the ros2-rust team we are planning to submit one next year once ros2-rust becomes more mature and gains more features. Right now the foundations are there, and the integration with ROS2 is quite solid, but still some basic features are missing (that’s changing rapidly, though)
Personally, I feel like the advantages are quite obvious and what would be best for the community (both Rust and ROS) is to focus on creating solutions — i.e., less talking and more doing I’m not taking digs at anyone, I would just love to see more solutions in this community.
The reason I think this would be useful is that many aren’t programming polyglots in the robotics world. I get the impression that even though the language isn’t that new, nearly every roboticist only knows why it exists without the slightest idea why they should care. I have a few other talks I have considered that basically boil down to “roboticists should learn to love their programming languages”. The reason I created this post is to feel out if I was off base in my impression that roboticists would appreciate a primer on what Rust is or if this is already a solved problem. If people already know we should just get on with making it the future and this isn’t needed.
At least in my bubble of roboticists, polyglots are not the norm and this sort of primer seemed like it might be useful. Hence the post.
I’m also here to help try to make this a reality to the best of my ability and time.
However, you might want to contact each of the Rust-related projects in case they have any feedback or they plan to submit a talk themselves.