Roto - Terts Diepraam | EuroRust 2025

Description

*Roto: A Fast and Safe Scripting Language - Terts Diepraam at EuroRust 2025 🦀* There are many excellent scripting languages for Rust, but, while building a BGP engine Rotonda at NLnet Labs, the team found that none of the existing languages fit their purpose. They are usually dynamically typed and interpreted. Errors are therefore only caught at runtime and they are slower than they’d like. So, they did the only logical thing and decided to make their own language from scratch. That language became Roto; a statically-typed scripting language with Rust-inspired syntax that is compiled to machine code using cranelift. It achieves pretty good performance out of the box and guarantees that there are no type errors at runtime. By virtue of being written in Rust, Roto is easy to embed in any Rust application. In addition, types and functions from Rust can be registered into Roto so they can be used in Roto scripts. This talk introduces the Roto language and tells the story of how it came to be. You will learn how to write Roto code and how to integrate it in your own Rust projects. Along the way, you’ll gain some insights about how it works under the hood. *About Terts Diepraam* Terts Diepraam is a software engineer at NLnet Labs, where he works on the Roto language and the Domain crate. He is also one of the organisers of the RustNL and RustWeek conferences. In his spare time, he has contributed extensively to the uutils coreutils project. He lives in Amsterdam and loves bouldering, board games, improvisational theatre & going to concerts. -------------------- *EuroRust 2026* – Get your ticket for EuroRust 2026 now and join us in Barcelona! 👉 https://eurorust.eu _EuroRust is organized by Mainmatter, experts in Rust and distributed systems_ 👉 https://mainmatter.com/rust/