Name: Workshop 3: Using Advent of Code as an FFI Playground (Additional Registration Required)
Start: 2026-09-08T09:00:00-0400
End: 2026-09-08T12:30:00-0400

Workshop 3: Using Advent of Code as an FFI Playground (Additional Registration Required)

Tuesday September 8, 2026 09:00 - 12:30 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Using Advent of Code (AoC) puzzles as the substrate, participants build a working Rust FFI library from scratch, wrapping a real AoC solution in a C glue layer and calling it from multiple different target languages. By the end of the workshop, attendees leave with a working multi-language project, a replicable methodology, and hands-on intuition for the pitfalls that make production FFI hard.
AoC problems are uniquely well-suited for FFI practice because they have diverse input/output types (primitives, strings, iterators), a motivating narrative that makes repetition feel worthwhile, no production baggage — you can break things freely — and progressively increasing complexity across 12-25 days of problems each year. Unlike algorithm-focused competitive programming, this approach uses AoC’s rich problem variety to stress-test real cross-platform FFI patterns: string encoding mismatches between Java and Swift, async model incompatibilities, and the lowest-common-denominator constraints that make production FFI viable.

Workshops are optional add-ons for in-person attendees only and are not included in RustConf tickets. Workshop tickets can be purchased for an additional fee.

Speakers

Alyssa Evans

Staff Software Engineer, Ditto

Alyssa Evans is a Staff Engineer specializing in production Rust FFI across Swift, Android/Java, and other target platforms. Less than two years after first writing Rust, she was hired for her FFI expertise at Ditto, a company with 5+ years of production Rust SDK experience. Her work... Read More →

Tuesday September 8, 2026 09:00 - 12:30 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

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