RustConf 2026

RustConf 2026

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11:05 EDT

"Rust: Batteries Included" — Inside Volvo Cars' SmartCell, The Next-Gen EV Battery

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:05 - 11:45 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

SmartCell is Volvo Cars’ new AC battery technology, marking a breakthrough in EV development by eliminating complex components like the inverter and onboard charger. This simplifies the drivetrain, reduces cost, and enables a cleaner architecture by shifting more intelligence into the battery itself — and this is where Rust comes in. Building on our experience bringing Rust into production automotive systems, we use it to deliver robust, correct, and secure embedded software with strong performance and predictable behavior. This talk explores how Rust supports this software‑defined battery technology and the engineering lessons from scaling Rust further into automotive systems.

Speakers

Julius Gustavsson

Expert, System Architect, Volvo Car Corporation

Julius Gustavsson has well over 20 years of experience developing embedded systems software spanning multiple industries from consumer electronics and telecommunications to avionics and automotive. Shortly before joining Volvo Cars he had discovered Rust and became convinced of its... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:05 - 11:45 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:05 EDT

Good or Bad Vibes? Coding with AI in Rust

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:05 - 11:45 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

AI-assisted Rust code writing is increasing in prevalence in both open-source and production environments. Recent LLM models can write Rust that compiles, passes tests and may look idiomatic, yet there can be underlying issues. Crate maintainers may frequently encounter "vibe-coded" contributions: code that is syntactically correct but architecturally un-idiomatic.
Get ready to contribute! This talk will mix maintainer experience with a small live snapshot of how the room is encountering AI in Rust today.
Drawing from lessons learned while maintaining an open-source Rust crate and managing a contributor community, the speaker will examine where AI genuinely accelerates development and where it consistently struggles. Rather than focusing on tools or prompts, the talk explores how LLM generated patterns work with Rust’s ownership borrow checker, type system, and particularly with Rust’s crate design.
We will look at patterns in “vibe-coded” Rust: code that may work but lack clear invariants and code fighting lifetimes and borrow checker issues. We’ll see where AI genuinely helps Rust developers, where it can actually struggle, and what it could mean for learning, reviewing, and maintaining Rust code.

Speakers

Lisa Crossman

Bioinformatics Consultant, SequenceAnalysis.co.uk

Lisa Crossman is originally a Lab Biologist with a wealth of experience in scientific research and programming. She has a degree in Microbiology from University of Bristol, UK, MSc in Molecular Genetics from the University of Leicester and a PhD in Bacterial Genetics and Molecular... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:05 - 11:45 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:05 EDT

Zngur: Simplified Rust/C++ Integration

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:05 - 11:45 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

A good C++ interop solution is essential for organizations migrating new development to Rust on their large, existing C++ codebases. While popular solutions exist, they often require unsafe-Rust expertise or make assumptions about the code being exposed. These problems are compounded when you add experienced C++ engineers to the mix who are Rust novices.

Zngur, a relatively new Rust/C++ interop solution, takes a different approach: one that is both principled and delightful for experienced C++ developers. Taking the stance that C++ semantics are a superset of Rust's, calling Rust from C++ requires only declaring what should be exposed, and the other direction involves writing a simple layer on the C++ side.

This talk covers the basics of Zngur's architecture, how to use it, and practical considerations for applying it to a large C++ codebase.

Speakers

David Sankel

Principal Scientist, Adobe

David Sankel leads Adobe's Software Technology Lab, which is charged with improving software development across the industry through training, research, and library/tool design. He is an active member of Rust's t-lang/interop working group and the C++ Standardization Committee. His... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:05 - 11:45 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:55 EDT

Detecting Borrow and Provenance Bugs Across Unsafe Rust and C/C++ Interoperability

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:55 - 12:35 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Rust’s ownership system eliminates many memory errors at compile time, yet real-world systems routinely bypass these guarantees through unsafe code, raw pointers, and foreign interfaces to C/C++. In these contexts, failures often stem not from simple memory faults but from violations of Rust’s semantic aliasing and provenance rules, which may remain invisible to conventional debugging methods.

This talk demonstrates practical techniques for diagnosing such violations across unsafe Rust and cross-language boundaries. It contrasts byte-level memory instrumentation that detects spatial and temporal errors with semantic execution methods that track pointer provenance, initialization state, and language invariants. It further presents ownership-aware instrumentation strategies that selectively monitor high-risk pointers using lifetime information, reducing overhead while preserving detection capability. Finally, it shows how dynamic provenance tracking can enforce borrow permissions during execution, exposing aliasing violations introduced by foreign code.

The talk concludes with guidance on choosing appropriate methodologies based on precision, performance, and deployability in production systems.

Speakers

Joannah Nanjekye

Researcher, Canergie Mellon University

Joannah Nanjekye is a programming languages researcher/ special faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research spans programming language design, optimization and garbage collection. She is the author of the book, Python 2 and 3 Compatibility, published by Apress, but has also... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:55 - 12:35 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:55 EDT

Fearless Concurrency on the GPU

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:55 - 12:35 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

This session introduces a novel open source Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that enables developers to author high-performance GPU kernels directly in safe Rust. The DSL employs a tile-based programming model targeting the Tile IR open source MLIR dialect, allowing developers to focus on algorithms that decompose large tensor-based computations into smaller tile-based ones. By automating memory management and the utilization of specialized hardware like matrix accelerators, the DSL raises the GPU programming abstraction, compiling to high-performance binaries without the need for unsafe Rust.

To orchestrate workloads on modern systems, a tensor programming API enables the static composition of data movement and kernel launch operations into discrete device operations. These device operations are asynchronously submitted as tasks to multiple GPUs using a preferred async Rust runtime. Consequently, the async runtime serves as a unified scheduler of concurrent activities running on both the CPU and GPU.

Through an exploration of this system, attendees will gain a fundamental understanding of why data races occur in GPU code and see how they are fundamentally eliminated through the application of Rust’s ownership model. The session illustrates how to enforce memory safety within a macro-based DSL and extends those guarantees to asynchronous orchestration, providing a practical framework for building high-performance heterogeneous systems.

Speakers

Melih Elibol

Senior Research Scientist, NVIDIA

Melih Elibol is a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA, where he works on programming systems for GPU computing. He created cutile-rs, a safe Rust DSL for tile-based CUDA kernels. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley, where he focused on distributed systems for machine learning.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:55 - 12:35 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:55 EDT

Replacing #[cfg] with Traits: The Inlinable Dyn Extension Trait Pattern

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:55 - 12:35 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Library authors often face a painful trade-off: support optional features via a labyrinth of compile-time #[cfg] gates, or rely on stubbed defaults and API toggles that push feature negotiation to runtime - at the expense of binary bloat and runtime assertions.

This talk explores a third option: the "Inlineable Dyn Extension Trait" (IDET) pattern. By leveraging Rust's type system and modern compiler optimizations, it is possible to write zero-cost APIs that offer the best of all worlds: a seamless DevEx without #[cfg] gates, assertion-less static/dynamic feature negotiation, and codegen that consistently strips unused features as dead code.

This session is informed by the architecture and evolution of the `gdbstub` crate - an ergonomic, feature-rich, and easy-to-integrate implementation of the GDB Remote Serial Protocol.

Attendees will learn how to design flexible, modular, ergonomic libraries that scale from no_std microcontrollers to modern hypervisors, without succumbing to "#[cfg]-hell".

Speakers

Daniel Prilik

Systems Software Engineer, Meta

Daniel is a Systems Software Engineer who has been writing Rust since 2017. He is the author of `gdbstub`, and a former core dev on the OpenVMM project.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 11:55 - 12:35 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:00 EDT

Compiling the Linux Kernel with gccrs

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:00 - 14:40 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

After five years of intense development and focus on the standard library, the gccrs project is now finally able to compile existing production Rust code - with our first major milestone being the Linux kernel.

This talk will narrate the journey that the compiler underwent in order to handle the difficult Rust standard library as well as various crates within the kernel. We will explore curious Rust behavior, unassuming code snippets with complex compiler ramifications, as well as numerous hacks and trivia from both rustc and gccrs. The inner workings of a Rust compiler will be explored, and you will gain a deeper understanding of just how much work is done behind the scenes, and how that allows for the Rust programming language to be so ergonomic at the cost of the compiler engineers’ sanity.

Speakers

Pierre-Emmanuel Patry

Compiler Engineer, Embecosm

Toolchain engineer at Embecosm and lecturer at EPITA, Pierre-Emmanuel has been involved with GCC for three years. His work mostly revolves around the Rust frontend and the RISCV backend.

Arthur Cohen

Compiler Engineer, Embecosm

Arthur is a French compiler engineer working full-time on the gccrs project at Embecosm. He is responsible for many of the bugs within the macro expansion and name resolution passes of the frontend.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:00 - 14:40 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:00 EDT

Reverse Engineering Rust Malware in 2026

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:00 - 14:40 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

In the past several years, professional malware reverse engineers have come to a terrible realization: They need to learn how to reverse Rust programs. The widespread adoption of Rust has not only led to an increase in legitimate software targets to study and examine for vulnerabilities, but also an explosion in malware written in Rust.

This talk is a survey of the reverse engineering landscape for Rust malware in 2026. It walks through the analysis of a Rust malware sample, and discuss the techniques that Rust malware authors are using in their programs. It looks at the limitations of program analysis and decompilation tools, which are still largely built to analyze C programs, against Rust binaries. Finally, it discusses the challenges present in teaching Rust reverse engineering to malware reverse engineers, and the differences in mindset, tool adoption, and educational approach between malware reversers and Rust software developers.

Speakers

Cindy Xiao

Security Researcher, Decoder Loop

Cindy Xiao is an experienced malware analyst, security researcher, and software developer. She has given talks and workshops on malware reverse engineering at leading cybersecurity conferences, including RECon, RE//verse, and NorthSec. Cindy is the founder of Decoder Loop, a training... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:00 - 14:40 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:00 EDT

Tokio, Rayon, and the GPU: Profiling a Radiology AI Pipeline in Rust

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:00 - 14:40 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

How do you go about profiling and optimizing a performance-critical medical AI system in Rust?

This talk presents a case study of porting a radiology AI system from Python to Rust, a system that had been shown to boost radiologist productivity by up to 40% in a study, but that relies on high-performance ingestion and processing of data to deliver these results. This resulting system leverages both Tokio and Rayon to power a complex pipeline including async, CPU-intensive, and GPU-intensive workloads.

Attendees will learn the practical profiling techniques used to identify bottlenecks in this system, will see the decisions made in order to overcome these bottlenecks, and will get a brief look at those challenges that are still left tackle. The result is a system that processes nearly a million radiology studies a year across 10+ hospitals on one on-prem commodity GPU.

Speakers

Eric Karl

Principal Solutions Architect, Northwestern Medicine

Eric Karl is the technical lead for the ARIES Radiology project at Northwestern Medicine. He has led a push to leverage Rust in Northwestern Medicine's AI efforts.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:00 - 14:40 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:50 EDT

From C++ APIs to Idiomatic Rust: Wrapper Design Patterns

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:50 - 15:30 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

In this talk, we’ll walk through a practical example of wrapping a real C++ library and show repeatable design patterns for: modelling ownership and lifetimes, mapping error handling into Result, defining safe abstraction boundaries, and minimising unsafe surface area. We’ll also discuss how generated bindings (e.g., Crubit-style tools) accelerate interop, and why wrapper design still requires deliberate human judgment.

We’ll cover common interop footguns like unsound Send/Sync assumptions, ABI/layout hazards, panic/exception boundary issues, accidental copies, and wrapper-layer performance regressions, and close with a review checklist teams can apply immediately.

This matters because in large production C++ codebases, adoption often starts with “generate bindings” but teams quickly discover that bindings aren’t APIs. The wrapper design is what determines safety, ergonomics, and long-term maintainability under constraints like thread-safety, exceptions, stable APIs, and strict performance budgets.

Speakers

Divya Chakarwarti

Software Engineer, Core Dev Rust Team, Google

Divya is a software engineer at Google’s Core Dev Rust team, focused on developing safe wrappers, C++/Rust interoperability, and scaling Rust in production.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:50 - 15:30 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:50 EDT

The Future of Rust in Academia

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:50 - 15:30 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Discover Rust's potential to shape the future of software engineering in academia! In this talk, we'll explore why Rust’s safety, performance, and growing industry demand make it the ideal language for modern curricula, empowering students to explore fundamentals, e.g. low-level hardware and language design, and thus preparing them best to build the future.

Speakers

Mordecai Etukudo

Software Engineer, Rust Africa

Mordecai Etukudo is a software engineer and community leader driving Rust adoption in academia and open-source to empower the next generation of developers.

Bart Massey

Portland State University, Associate Professor of Computer Science

Bart Massey is a 26-year Portland State University Assistant CS Professor with a PhD in AI. He has taught Rust, Embedded Rust and Rust Web to many students over about eight years. Bart is the founder and current director of Rust-Edu (https://rust-edu.org), promoting and improving... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:50 - 15:30 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:50 EDT

Unsafe Rust

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:50 - 15:30 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

This presentation explores the role of Unsafe Rust in systems programming and its implications for safety-critical software. Rust is designed to provide memory safety and prevent common programming errors through its ownership and borrowing model. However, certain low-level operations require the use of unsafe code, which introduces risks such as undefined behavior (UB) and under-specified semantics. We examine the distinction between safe and unsafe Rust, the nature of UB, and why formal specifications are essential for reliability. The talk highlights challenges in defining Rust’s semantics, the concept of library-level invariants, and the importance of operational models for correctness. Finally, we outline the “Golden Path” toward a complete Rust specification, including initiatives like MiniRust, A-mir-formality, Tree Borrows, and Miri, which aim to close the UB gap and provide a rigorous foundation for safe and predictable Rust programs.

Speakers

Robert C. Seacord

Standardization Lead, Woven by Toyota

Robert C. Seacord is the Standardization Lead at Woven by Toyota where he works on the Software Craft. Robert is the convenor of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 international standardization working group for the C programming language.Previously, Robert was a Technical Director at... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 14:50 - 15:30 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

16:00 EDT

Listening to the Radio with Rust

Wednesday September 9, 2026 16:00 - 16:40 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

The radio spectrum is full of signals: FM music stations, aircraft transponders, ham radio repeaters, and even an atomic clock broadcasting the exact time. With a $30 USB dongle and some Rust code, you can tune in to all of it.

This talk is an introduction to software-defined radio (SDR) through the lens of Rust. We'll start with what's actually out there on the airwaves: the surprisingly rich world of signals you can receive with cheap hardware. Then we'll walk through the Rust ecosystem for SDR: connecting to an RTL-SDR receiver, working with raw IQ samples, and turning those samples into something meaningful.

Along the way, we'll build three small programs: an FM radio receiver that demodulates broadcast stations, a decoder for a shortwave time signal, and an ADS-B-based flight tracker. Each demo highlights different strengths of Rust for signal processing — zero-cost abstractions for real-time DSP pipelines, strong typing for managing sample rates and frequency math, and the performance needed to keep up with a continuous stream of radio data.

No prior radio or DSP experience is needed. You'll leave with a working mental model of how software-defined radio works and a clear path to start experimenting with Rust and radio yourself.

Speakers

Thomas Eckert

Software Engineer, Redpanda Data

Thomas is a software engineer at Redpanda Data in Ottawa. He's written Rust since 2018 and recently fell down the software-defined radio rabbit hole.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 16:00 - 16:40 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

16:00 EDT

Migrating RediSearch from C to Rust - Challenges and Techniques

Wednesday September 9, 2026 16:00 - 16:40 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Cybersecurity is more prominent than ever. Rust offers the perfect opportunity to modernize your companies tech stack, address tech debt, get shiny new developer features while also addressing security needs. But rewriting is big and scary. It can massively increase complexity, slow down engineering and put features at risk. We want to share our learnings from helping a client, RediSearch, migrate a complex and highly critical codebase from C to Rust. The challenges we faced and the solutions and techniques we developed with the client, both technical and organizational.

Speakers

Jonas Kruckenberg

Senior Software Engineering Consultant, Mainmatter

Jonas is an engineer at Mainmatter and creator of the k23 operating system. He has helped people to build fast, secure, cross-platform desktop apps through his work on Tauri and is deeply involved in open-source, local-first, and humane software. Outside of code, he sings in classical... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 16:00 - 16:40 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

16:00 EDT

When Safe Code is Fast - Scientific Computing in Rust

Wednesday September 9, 2026 16:00 - 16:40 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Bounds checking is slowing Rust down, the borrow checker prevents performant data structures, and existing libraries in C++ and Fortran have had too many decades of optimizations to just catch up with them - we have heard it all. But, what if we don’t listen?

In this talk, we’ll explore two new features of the Rust standard library: computing derivatives via std::autodiff, and running code on GPUs, via std::offload. We will put our compiler googles on, and have a close look at plenty of Benchmarks for these new features, and their possible safe or unsafe usages. (Un)surprisingly we will see that safe Rust fares a lot better than unsafe Rust in both cases. After this talk and looking through plenty of examples, these results hopefully become a bit more intuitive.

Speakers

Manuel Drehwald

PhD Student, University of Toronto

Manuel is a PhD student in the Matter Lab at the University of Toronto. He is working on adding new features to LLVM and the Rust compiler, in order to support Scientific Computing, High Performance Computing (HPC), and Machine Learning applications in Rust. In previous groups, Man... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 16:00 - 16:40 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

RustConf 2026

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