RustViz: Interactively Visualizing Ownership and Borrowing

TL;DR

RustViz is an interactive visualization tool designed to help learners understand Rust's ownership and borrowing rules through dynamic timelines, addressing the language's learning curve.

Contribution

The paper introduces RustViz, a novel tool that visualizes ownership and borrowing in Rust, aiding education and comprehension of complex memory safety concepts.

Findings

Facilitates understanding of Rust's ownership model

Supports educators in teaching Rust concepts

Aims to improve learning outcomes for Rust learners

Abstract

Rust is a systems programming language that guarantees memory safety without the need for a garbage collector by statically tracking ownership and borrowing events. The associated rules are subtle and unique among industry programming languages, which can make learning Rust more challenging. Motivated by the challenges that Rust learners face, we are developing RustViz, a tool that allows teachers to generate an interactive timeline depicting ownership and borrowing events for each variable in a Rust code example. These visualizations are intended to help Rust learners develop an understanding of ownership and borrowing by example. This paper introduces RustViz by example, shows how teachers can use it to generate visualizations, describes learning goals, and proposes a study designed to evaluate RustViz based on these learning goals.