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Systems & Low-Level Advanced

Rust Systems Programming: Unsafe, FFI and Zero-Cost Abstractions

Cross the safety boundary deliberately, bind to C, and prove your abstractions are free.

7 students

DO Created by Dimitri Orlov

  • Last updated August 2026
  • English
  • 13h 22m of material
  • 100 lessons

What you will learn

8 concrete outcomes

Every bullet below is something you will have built, shipped or be able to explain by the time you finish the last lesson.

  • State precisely what unsafe permits and what it never suspends
  • Build safe abstractions over unsafe internals with documented safety contracts
  • Detect undefined behaviour with Miri and interpret what it reports
  • Bind to C libraries with repr attributes, bindgen and correct string handling
  • Expose a Rust library to C consumers using cbindgen and a stable interface
  • Implement lock-free structures with atomics and choose correct memory orderings
  • Read generated assembly to confirm an abstraction really compiled away
  • Benchmark against a C baseline with criterion and interpret the results honestly

Course curriculum

7 modules · 100 lessons · 13h 22m of material

13 lessons running 1h 44m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

14 lessons running 1h 52m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

14 lessons running 1h 50m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

15 lessons running 2h 00m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

13 lessons running 1h 44m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

16 lessons running 2h 08m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

15 lessons running 1h 58m in total. Each lesson ships with the finished source files and a short written recap, so you can follow along in your own editor and skim the module again later.

Lesson-by-lesson titles, code downloads and exercises live inside the course library you get access to straight after checkout.

7 modules · 100 lessons

13h 22m total length

Requirements

Short list, and deliberately so. If you meet these you can start today.

  • Confident intermediate Rust: traits, lifetimes, generics and smart pointers
  • Working knowledge of C, including pointers, structs and linking
  • A Rust nightly toolchain for Miri plus a C compiler and CMake

About this course

Safe Rust covers the overwhelming majority of what you write, and then there is the remainder: allocators, data structures the borrow checker cannot express, bindings to existing C libraries, and code where a memory layout is dictated by hardware or a protocol. This course is about that remainder, written responsibly.

It begins with what unsafe actually means, which is a shorter list than most people assume: dereferencing raw pointers, calling unsafe functions, implementing unsafe traits, accessing mutable statics and touching union fields. You then learn to construct safe abstractions over unsafe internals, encode invariants that the type system enforces, and document safety contracts the way the standard library does. Miri runs throughout to catch undefined behaviour that tests will not.

The foreign function interface modules cover calling C from Rust and Rust from C, representation attributes, string conversion across the boundary, callbacks, error mapping, and generating bindings with bindgen and headers with cbindgen. The final modules build a lock-free queue with atomics and the memory ordering rules explained honestly, then verify zero-cost claims by reading the generated assembly and benchmarking against a C implementation.

Topics covered

Frequently asked questions

Still unsure about something? Write to misteryjj100@gmail.com and a human answers, usually the same working day.

The opposite. Most modules are about confining unsafe to the smallest possible core and proving the surrounding abstraction is sound, which is how the standard library is written.

Enough to read a header, understand pointers and structs, and link a static library. You do not need to be a C expert; the bindings work is driven from the Rust side.

Yes, through rustup on the nightly toolchain. The setup lesson covers all three platforms and lists the exact toolchain versions used.

Checkout is handled on our provider's secure payment page. The moment your payment clears we email your personal access link and access code to the address you used at checkout, and the same link appears in your account library. There is nothing to install and nothing to wait for.

Email misteryjj100@gmail.com within 14 days of your purchase, quote your order number, and we refund the full amount to your original payment method. No form to fill in and no questions about how much of the course you watched.

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Your instructor

DO

Dimitri Orlov

Rust engineer and performance specialist

  • 64 students taught
  • 4 courses published
  • 4.8 instructor rating
  • Rust
  • Low-level programming
  • Performance tuning
  • Embedded systems

Dimitri writes Rust for networking gear and battery-powered devices, and came to it after a long stretch of production C he does not miss. He teaches ownership and borrowing by showing the exact C bug each rule prevents, which makes the borrow checker feel like a colleague rather than an obstacle. His courses build a real binary — a parser, a server, a no-std firmware image — and then take a profiler to it. He reviews for a Rust working group and speaks at systems meetups.

See every course by Dimitri Orlov
$99 USD

One-time payment · lifetime access

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