Noah Lev Bartell-Mangel ‘27 Recognized for Contributions to the Rust Programming Language
Rust Foundation Project Fellowship will support Bartell-Mangel's work to improve user experience and performance.
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Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) second-year computer science major Noah Lev Bartell-Mangel has been awarded a 2024 Rust Foundation Project Fellowship. Just one of ten awarded this year, the fellowship will support Bartell-Mangel's contributions to the Rust programming language, which he began as a first-year student in high school.
“I am excited to continue my work on improving the user experience for Rustdoc users and cleaning up the technical debt that has held Rustdoc back for many years,” says Bartell-Mangel, referring to Rust’s standard documentation tool.
The fellowship follows Bartell-Mangel's 2022 second-place win in the undergraduate category of the ACM SIGPLAN POPL’22 Student Research Competition, achieved when he was a dual-enrollment high school student at the College of Marin. His winning paper formalized the “niche” memory layout optimization, which reduces the memory use of algebraic datatypes in languages, including Rust.
Today, Bartell-Mangel serves on both the Rustdoc team and the Rust compiler team, as part of a robust community of volunteers who maintain the language, first invented by a Mozilla engineer in 2006 to write “bare metal” code—which interacts directly with hardware—without the same risks of crashing as C/C++. Over the past four years, he has made over 1,000 contributions to the language.
In addition to his work on Rustdoc, Bartell-Mangel will focus on improving Rust’s const generics feature, which provides the ability to use constant values as generic types, increasing performance, reliability, and ease of programming, and making the language more suitable for performance-critical applications.
“I am passionate about enhancing Rust’s type system, and I look forward to bringing my academic knowledge of type theory to this project,” Bartell-Mangel says. At CICS, he currently uses Rust for research on systems programming as a member of the PLASMA lab (Programming Languages and Systems at Massachusetts), where he is inspired by Professor Emery Berger’s ethos to do “cool stuff that matters.”