Fearless Multimedia Programming
2018-09-29, 13:45–14:15 (UTC), Loft

Whether you are interested in multimedia programming in specific or curious about how Rust programming language can enable you to write almost-bug-free code without having to compromise on efficiency, this talk is for you.


GStreamer is a popular framework of choice for multimedia programming in the Linux world, especially for embedded. Since efficiency is a typical core requirement for embedded solutions, traditionally C/C++ have been the languages of choice for writing GStreamer applications and plugins. Unfortunately, this efficiency comes at the price of safety. Even the most skilled C/C++ developers make mistakes with memory management and the results could potentially be catastrophic. Thread safety is another aspect that is central to multimedia solutions but is extremely difficult to achieve with C/C++.

Rust language is designed to be both efficient and safe at the same time. In this talk, Zeeshan will present how GStreamer's Rust bindings not only make multimedia programming a lot safer, easier and fun but also allow developers to write even more efficient code than C/C++ in certain cases.

While the talk will be focused on multimedia and GStreamer in specific, most of the concepts presented shall be very generic.