Name: Writing a Zero-Copy Database Parser from the Ground Up
Start: 2026-09-10T14:35:00-0400
End: 2026-09-10T15:15:00-0400

Writing a Zero-Copy Database Parser from the Ground Up

Thursday September 10, 2026 14:35 - 15:15 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Building a high-performance database proxy demands wire-speed parsing with minimal overhead. This talk walks through the design and implementation of a zero-copy streaming parser in Rust that parses database wire protocols incrementally from the first byte received, using a fixed-size ring buffer and arena-allocated borrow tracking to yield structured slices directly into the network buffer with no intermediate copies and constant memory regardless of payload size.

The talk covers the core abstraction: a trait-based streaming API that uses Rust's type system to bind borrowed slices to the underlying ring buffer at compile time, a ring buffer designed to allow concurrent immutable borrows of disjoint regions across async yields, and a borrow tracker that manages lifetimes as the buffer is refilled. Attendees will see how a small ring buffer can parse and inspect every byte of an arbitrarily large payload, how deterministic pattern matching eliminates backtracking on partial reads, and where carefully scoped unsafe makes the design sound.

Speakers

Devon Tietjen

Co-Founder, CEO & CTO, Eden

Devon is the co-founder and CTO at Eden, where he leads the development of database and networking infrastructure products. Devon has been programming since 9, with an interest in embedded programming, distributed systems, algorithms, and protocols.

Thursday September 10, 2026 14:35 - 15:15 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

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