Production Unsafe Rust: Patterns for Zero-Copy Performance

When Safe Rust Meets Reality

Picture this: your beautifully crafted, idiomatic Rust service is processing 50MB/s when the business needs 5GB/s. Your network parser allocates on every packet when microseconds matter. Your SIMD experiments somehow made things slower. Welcome to the performance wall that separates hobby projects from production systems.

This is where unsafe Rust transforms from “dangerous territory to avoid” into “the tool that saves your career.

What Makes This Talk Different

Most unsafe Rust content focuses on how to write unsafe code. This talk focuses on when, why, and what happens after you ship it. These are battle-tested patterns from systems handling terabytes daily, not academic examples.

Who Should Attend

Perfect for you if:
• You’ve hit performance walls that safe Rust can’t break through
• You’re curious about unsafe but don’t know where to start safely
• You maintain high-performance Rust systems and need to justify architectural decisions
• You’re evaluating whether Rust can replace C/C++ in performance-critical applications

You’ll leave knowing:

• Exactly when unsafe provides real benefits vs. perceived ones, with decision frameworks you can apply immediately
• How to implement unsafe patterns that survive production code review and team turnover
• A systematic approach to weighing safety vs. performance trade-offs based on actual business impact
• Specific architectural patterns you can adapt to your performance bottlenecks

Why This Matters Now

As Rust moves into domains traditionally dominated by C and C++, the ability to use unsafe responsibly becomes a competitive advantage. The companies winning in performance-critical markets aren’t avoiding unsafe—they’re using it strategically and safely, with the engineering discipline to maintain it long-term.