I attended the inaugural TokioConf this week. Here's my trip report. I'll link talks I mention if/when they become available on YouTube.

The conference was held in Portland (just a short flight from where I live). I flew in on Monday and walked around Portland for a while. I spent a couple of hours in Powell's and had a plate of noodles at Frank's Noodle House. I wrote a MeCard generator and made a phone background with a QR code that I could quickly show people to give them my contact information.

The conference kicked off on Tuesday. This was a single-track conference so everyone heard all the same talks. The opening keynote was given by Carl Lerche (a short history of Tokio) and Alice Rhyl (latest Tokio news). I was excited to hear about unstable io_uring support and the new LocalRuntime for non-Send tasks (which replaces LocalSet).

There were more talks in the rest of the day. I'll only mention my favorite, June Welker's talk, "Using !Send with the benefits of Send".

The lightning talks at the end of the day were also particularly strong. I particularly enjoyed hearing about dial9 (a newer (possibly better)) version of tokio-console. We also learned about why retry budgets are the best retry policy from Sean Monstar.

Dinner/social was held at Wonderlove, a food truck spot. I chatted with many lovely folks and ate some delicious food!

The second day kicked off with two talks that I enjoyed quite a bit: Noah Kennedy's talk about pingora at Cloudflare, and Sean Klein's talk about Futurelock. I highly recommend the Futurelock talk to anyone that writes async Rust.

More talks for the rest of the day, I'll mention two of them that were both about io_uring: one a more general talk about io_uring itself and why it's better, and the other about tokio's specific implementation of io_uring. There was a lot of excitement about io_uring and it's promise of better performance for applications that do a lot of file reading suffused throughout the conference.

The second day ended with Niko Matsakis's closing keynote, which I unfortunately had to miss most of to catch my flight, but I'll be going back and watching the recording.

Conclusion

I really, really enjoyed this conference! This was actually the first conference I've ever been to, and it set a high bar for future conferences. Every talk was very technical and I learned a lot/wrote down a lot of stuff to look up later. Every person I talked to was very nice and working on very interesting things. The food was great!

I come away from TokioConf thinking about digging more into tokio internals, trying harder to push the boundaries of what can be done with async Rust, and going deeper on systems, operating systems and databases. I know some stuff, but these people really know some stuff. I feel inspired to read some systems papers and implement them in the coming year.