Rewrite, Optimize, Repeat - Luca Palmieri | EuroRust 2025

Rewrite, Optimize, Repeat: Our Journey Porting a Triemap From C to Rust - Luca Palmieri at EuroRust 2025 🦀 In this talk, you’ll learn about an experience porting a battle-tested C TrieMap implementation to Rust, as part of a larger C-to-Rust migration of Redis’ search capabilities. We’ll walk through the missteps, the initial design we implemented and then discarded, the profiling rabbit holes, and the eventual breakthroughs that led us to a Rust version that not only matched but outperformed the original, without compromising safety and memory usage. Along the way, we’ll cover design tradeoffs, lessons in data layout, and how custom DSTs and a deep understanding of Rust’s memory model helped one team turn a rewrite into a real upgrade. If you’ve ever been tempted to replace C with Rust (or you’re planning to), this talk is for you. About Luca Palmieri Luca Palmieri builds technology products for a living. His current focus is on backend development, software architecture and the Rust programming language. He currently works at MainMatter as a Principal Engineering Consultant. He partners with teams across the industry to make sure they succeed in adopting or scaling their Rust usage, where it makes sense to do so. He was formerly at AWS and TrueLayer. He has been part of the Rust community since 2018 and is best known as the author of 'Zero to Production in Rust', an introduction to using Rust for backend development, and '100 Exercises to Learn Rust', a hands-on introduction to the language. When he is not coding, you’ll find him baking cakes or rolling pasta sheets. -------------------- EuroRust 2026 – Get your ticket for EuroRust 2026 now and join us in Barcelona! 👉 https://eurorust.eu EuroRust is organized by Mainmatter, experts in Rust and distributed systems 👉 https://mainmatter.com/rust/