17-350 Safe Systems Programming in Rust
12 units, Carnegie Mellon University
Rust is transforming systems programming, giving developers the tools to write memory- and time-efficient code at a systems level of abstraction while providing safety guarantees stronger than most high-level languages. This course will provide comprehensive coverage of safe systems programming techniques, using Rust as the vehicle of instruction although the techniques covered can be applied in other languages (typically with fewer static guarantees). We will cover ownership types, safe manual memory management, safe concurrency, asynchronous code, and how to provide a safe interface that encapsulates unsafe code. Students will practice these techniques while writing systems programs from a variety of domains, including threaded interpreters, webassembly executables in the browser, embedded device controllers, and distributed consistency protocols. We will also cover Rust specifics, including ownership, borrowing, lifetimes, Rust's concurrency model, async, error handling, unsafe, the foreign function interface, traits, functional programming, reference counted pointers, modules and crates, and macros.
Prerequisites: 15-213 (min C)
Offered: Fall 2026
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