Migrating C to Rust
3 days 
Bookable for teams – on-site or remote 
Individual tickets available About this workshop
Migrating C code to Rust is rarely a single “rewrite” step. It’s a process that forces you to weave together these two very different systems. Calling conventions, memory management, tooling, and (most importantly) how you structure and test your code. These things can quickly explode in complexity if misunderstood or incorrectly managed.
We designed this workshop to give your team a coherent path from “I can write Rust” to “I can ship Rust in a C codebase” without hand-waving over these complexities.
We start from the fundamentals of C/Rust interoperability and gradually build up to a pragmatic module rewrite process, touching on performance, testing, debugging, and long-term maintainability.
By the end of the workshop, you will have a clear mental model of Rust’s FFI boundaries, know how to design FFI-friendly APIs, have written plenty of (correct) unsafe code, and have a concrete playbook to migrate real modules with confidence.
The workshop is designed for software developers working in or around C/C++ codebases. Familiarity with Rust basics is helpful, but we’ll introduce the concepts you need as we go.
Bookable for teams
3 days
On-site or remote
Individual tickets
1.200,00 €
Syllabus
The basics
We will cover the essentials of FFI-safe Rust:extern "C", ABI considerations,#[no_mangle], and when to userepr(C).Building and Linking
We will look at how Rust links C code in practice: the-syscrate pattern, usingbuild.rs, integrating with existing build systems, and generating bindings with bindgen — followed by how to build safe abstractions on top of unsafe bindings.Idiomatic FFI
We will translate common C idioms into idiomatic Rust: iterators instead of manual loops, return values vs out-parameters, vtables vs traits (and when to keep the C shape), strings and encodings (CStrvsstr), return codes vs errors, as well as bitflags.Testing, Benchmarks, and Sanitizers
Testing, benchmarks, sanitizers, and more. We will put our FFI code on solid foundations. We will learn how to effectively use tools like Valgrind, sanitizers, and Miri. We will discover their limitations and when to reach for which tool.
Your mentor
Our Attendees Say...
Very good format.
Very good, the balance of practical work mixed with bite size new concepts works nicely
Who we are
Mainmatter has been active in the Rust ecosystem for years, creating the 100 Exercises to Learn Rust course, the C to Rust Migration Book organizing EuroRust, and contributing to open source.
We help teams adopt and build on Rust with confidence via trainings and workshops, hands-on team reinforcement, codebase assessments, and more.
We have trained developers at
Bookable for teams
3 days
On-site or remote
Individual tickets
1.200,00 €
