Type Theory for Busy Engineers - Niko Matsakis

Niko Matsakis delivers a talk about Type Theory for Bitly engineers, focusing on the FormalityCore project, a tool for experimenting with type systems inspired by PLT Redux. He explains how to define a programming language more formally using grammars and Rust structures, demonstrating the creation of a simple language called EG and its type-checking rules. The talk covers defining data structures, specifying grammar, and using inference rules, illustrating how to write and test these rules using Rust code. The presentation includes live demos, showing how to test the parser and type checker, and concludes with a Q&A session about the scalability of the system to real-world scenarios like Rust, its handling of semantic lifetimes, and its role in formalizing the Rust language specification.