Handbook

This course aims to provide commentary and critique on the practice of programming, and the tooling used to program (primarily programming languages themselves). A variety of programming concepts across many programming languages are examined, including: syntax, typing, polymorphism, documentation, testing, meta-programming, concurrency, parallelism, safety, and more. The Rust programming language is used as a reference language to teach considerations behind these concepts. As a language commonly cited to be well-considered, it serves as a good foundation to help students understand where countless other languages may let them down. Lectures will compare and contrast Rust with other languages, but will also discuss where Rust can similarly let students down.

While proficiency in writing Rust programs is an important learning outcome of this course, of greater importance is the ability to write more robust programs in whichever language a student happens to be using at the time.

Per the advice of previous students, COMP6991 is a difficult course with a considerable workload. Please reach out to us either on the course forum or the course email if you're not sure whether COMP6991 is right for you.