How to Fit an Elephant in a Rusty Refrigerator: Conquering a 7,000-Type API

Legacy enterprise APIs are behemoths: decades-old, inheritance-heavy interfaces with thousands of types and a reputation for complexity. Building a Rust client for one meant battling dragons—polymorphism mismatches, glacial compile times, and a query API so arcane it’s nicknamed “the API from hell.”

In this talk, we’ll dissect how Rust’s unique features conquered these challenges:
• Polymorphism Wars: Why traits (with dynamic dispatch) won for inheritance hierarchies, enums triumphed for 3,000+ array types, and serde_json::Value became the hero for chaotic exception/event structures.
• Compile-Time Rebellion: How custom codegen replaced macros, dispatch logic bypassed 7,000-type bottlenecks, and #[derive(Debug)] became public enemy #1.
• Query API Alchemy: Transforming a notoriously complex query system into a GraphQL-like experience using macros that auto-generate type-safe queries, docs, and unmarshalling logic—in Rust.

You’ll leave with battle-tested strategies for taming legacy APIs, optimizing compile times, and leveraging Rust’s type system to turn “enterprise-grade” complexity into ergonomic, fearless code.