Welcome everyone, to the seventh offering of COMP6991: Solving Modern Programming Problems with Rust! We are so glad to have you all here and sincerely hope you enjoy your time with us here in this course.

First off, some quick administrivia:

Course website

The course website (where you will find this announcement) can be found at https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs6991/25T3/. This will also link you to the course outline, the course timetable, and the course forum (not accessible yet). This course does not use WebCMS3 nor Moodle (except to access Echo360 recordings).

Lectures

Our first lecture starts Tuesday week 1 (2025-09-16 18:00:00) -- that's in just 4 days! The lectures are from 6:00pm - 8:00pm on both Tuesdays and Wednesdays each week (except week 6). We plan to examine not just Rust code, but hopefully many different programming languages during the lectures and through this set the scope of our studies for COMP6991. I hope to see you there!

The lectures are hosted in-person at Colombo Theatre A (K-B16-LG03) on Tuesdays and E19 Patricia O'Shane 103 (K-E19-103) on Wednesdays. The lectures will be recorded (into Echo360), Live-streaming seems to be a coin-flip term to term. Hopefully it works this term, but it's sadly not something I have control over.

22T3's lecture recordings are also available anytime here.

Workshops

Through your myUNSW enrollment, you will have selected a workshop class to join each week. It may have shown up as LAB or something similar on the class registration -- this is your workshop. The workshops are held weekly (except week 6) on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Please attend the one workshop that you are enrolled in.

The workshops are heavily practical and involve code design, programming in Rust, and finally reviewing code written and design decisions made, including considering what the experience may have been in other programming languages, etc.

I highly recommend all students to attend at-least your first couple of workshops -- I think you'll find them to be a fun, educational, and social experience, and hopefully you won't need further convincing after that point. If you make the effort to attend them and find this not to be the case, please tell us why and we'll do better!

Our team

Our teaching team this term consists of:

• Alexander Blackmore
• Ava Cameron
• Ben Craighill
• Brian Li
• Brodie Hales
• Daniel Swords
• Dicko Evaldo
• Eric Cai
• Esha Tripathi
• Etkin Tetik
• Fritz Rehde
• Hanyuan Li
• Hui Shan Pan
• Ishan Dubey
• Jonathan Lin
• Kaiqi Liang
• Kobi Beckett
• Lorenzo Grillo
• Lucas Harvey
• Markus Bian
• Ningxiao Yang
• Riley Leighton
• Shrey Somaiya
• Sunny Chen
• Tom Kunc
• Uzman Zawahir
• Wisesa Resosudarmo
• Xavier Carey
• Yanlin Li

Wow, so many tutors this term!! We are extremely lucky to have such a talented and friendly teaching team. Please show your respect at all times to our course staff, who I know for certain are all incredibly excited to be teaching this course for you all!

Weekly exercises

On the course website you will find your first set of weekly exercises has already been released! The due date is Week 2 Wednesday, and this due date structure (week n + 1 Wednesday) will follow similarly for later weekly exercises. These (usually) provide autotests, and are submitted with 6991 give-crate. Weekly exercises will be released weeks 1-5,7-9 (inclusive), bringing a total of 8 weekly sets.

Note that we've also provided some week 0 exercises that are not assessed, and solely exist to help you make sure your Rust toolchain (whether working on CSE or at home) is working correctly, and get you started on some fundamentals.

Blog posts

In order to help recoup any lost marks from weekly exercises, we are offering "blog posts" for make-up marks! We hope they are a fun and rewarding activity, and you can read more about them here.

Difficulty

We would like to formally recognise that COMP6991 is a challenging course, with a relatively high workload. This will be spoken to further in the lectures, but if you are unsure whether COMP6991 is right for you, please send us an email to the course email address (see course outline).

Week One Lecture Slides

Slides for Lecture 1 Slides for Lecture 2 --

Welcome to the course everyone :)

Zac