Next week, 300 developers from around the world are descending on Portland for TokioConf — the inaugural conference for the Tokio project, one of the most widely used open source frameworks in the Rust programming language ecosystem. And they chose Portland. For their very first one.
From my perspective, it’s really nice to see Portland’s rich history of hosting the open source community continue. (OSCON called Portland home for the better part of two decades. We hosted DjangoCon multiple times. RailsConf. EmberConf ran here for years. Open Source Bridge — which we built ourselves when we needed a conference that was ours — ran from 2009 to 2018. FOSSY. NodeConf. JSConf. The list goes on and on and on.)
Not familiar with Tokio…? It’s the async runtime that powers a big ol’ chunk of the Internet’s infrastructure. If you’ve used something that runs on Rust and talks to a network, there’s a decent chance Tokio is underneath it. Companies like Amazon, Google, Discord, and Cloudflare build on top of it.
When you write your application in an asynchronous manner, you enable it to scale much better by reducing the cost of doing many things at the same time. However, asynchronous Rust code does not run on its own, so you must choose a runtime to execute it. The Tokio library is the most widely used runtime, surpassing all other runtimes in usage combined.
Additionally, Tokio provides many useful utilities. When writing asynchronous code, you cannot use the ordinary blocking APIs provided by the Rust standard library, and must instead use asynchronous versions of them. These alternate versions are provided by Tokio, mirroring the API of the Rust standard library where it makes sense.
The conference runs Monday through Wednesday, April 20-22, at the Hyatt Regency Portland. Monday is an optional workshop day — a hands-on session with the people who actually build and maintain the runtime — plus a guided Portland coffee tour (nice touch) and a group dinner at Tusk and Kachka. Tuesday and Wednesday are the main event: a single-track lineup of talks, panels, and “plenty of hallway conversations.” Tuesday evening wraps with a social at WonderLove food cart pod.
The speaker lineup includes Carl Lerche, the creator of Tokio and principal engineer at Amazon; Alice Ryhl from Google’s Android Rust team; Niko Matsakis, co-lead of the Rust Language Design Team; and Steve Klabnik, who’s been one of the most prominent voices in the Rust community for years.
For more information or to grab a ticket, visit TokioConf. For more information about the Tokio project, visit tokio.rs.
