RustConf 2026: Full Schedule

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09:00 EDT

Opening Remarks

Wednesday September 9, 2026 09:00 - 09:15 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

An introduction to RustConf 2026 from your host, the Rust Foundation!

Speakers

Dr. Rebecca Rumbul

Executive Director, Rust Foundation

Rebecca is the Executive Director and CEO of the Rust Foundation. She holds a PhD in Politics and Governance, and has worked as a consultant and researcher with governments, parliaments and development agencies all over the world, advocating for openness and transparency, and developing... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 09:00 - 09:15 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Keynotes

09:15 EDT

Keynote: Rust Adoption at Scale With Ubuntu

Wednesday September 9, 2026 09:15 - 09:45 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

When Ubuntu 25.10 shipped with Rust-based rewrites of core system packages like coreutils and sudo, it marked the first milestone toward making memory-safe utilities the default in Ubuntu. In this talk, Jon Seager charts the journey behind that decision, including the motivation, tradeoffs and surprises along the way. Canonical has now shipped Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, the first long term support release to feature these utilities with our trademark 15-year support and security maintenance. Also covered is the upki project, a collaboration between Canonical and the Rustls project, all the ways you can develop with Rust on Ubuntu, and our plans for the future.

Speakers

Jon Seager

VP of Engineering, Canonical

Jon is VP Engineering at Canonical, where he leads the Ubuntu Desktop, Server, Foundations, and Debcrafters teams. He conceived and led the "Oxidizing Ubuntu" initiative, making Ubuntu 25.10 the first major Linux distro to replace its coreutils and sudo implementations with Rust-based... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 09:15 - 09:45 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Keynotes

09:45 EDT

Sponsored Lighting Talk - Solana: Rustc: How I learned to Respect the Compiler.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 09:45 - 09:55 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Learn how Blueshift leverages rustc not just as a compiler but as critical developer infrastructure to optimise BPF bytecode to scale the Solana blockchain. Explore other novel use cases such as generating zero-knowledge proofs from MIR and enabling platform-specific optimizations with libcalls.

Speakers

Dean Little

Founder, Blueshift

Wednesday September 9, 2026 09:45 - 09:55 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

09:55 EDT

Project Update: A Decade of Rustls

Wednesday September 9, 2026 09:55 - 10:05 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Rustls has provided memory-safe Transport Layer Security (TLS) for Rust projects since 2016. In this talk, we'll look back on a decade of building and maintaining the library. We'll discuss the design decisions that shaped it, lessons learned from a security-critical open source project, and how adoption has grown across the ecosystem. We'll also cover what we've been working on recently, and share our plans and priorities for the next ten years of Rustls.

Speakers

Joe Birr-Pixton

Open source maintainer

I’m Joe, hailing from Cambridge, UK. I’m a security engineer, formerly with Twilio, Electric Imp, BlackBerry, Good Technology, Thales, and nCipher. These days I mostly work in Rust, but my professional experience is in C and C++. I’m the original author of the “rustls” crate... Read More →

Daniel McCarney

Open source maintainer

Daniel McCarney is a full-time open source maintainer from Canada working in applied cryptography. He helps maintain Rustls, a high-performance TLS library written in Rust, and the Go standard library's cryptography packages, among other projects. He also helped standardize and implement... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 09:55 - 10:05 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Project Updates

10:05 EDT

Sponsored Lightning Talk - Convex: Scaling Infrastructure With Confidence in the Age of AI

Wednesday September 9, 2026 10:05 - 10:15 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Learn how a dozen engineers run millions of deployments without losing data integrity. AI makes it tempting to let agents rewrite whole systems to scale faster. Hear how the infrastructure team at Convex uses AI agents carefully to protect the database and ship new layers of infrastructure with more confidence.

Speakers

Emma Forman Ling

Software Engineer, Convex

Wednesday September 9, 2026 10:05 - 10:15 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

10:15 EDT

Project Update: Bringing Rust into Python

Wednesday September 9, 2026 10:15 - 10:25 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

In the last few years, Python users started looking at Rust as an alternative for building Python modules. It can deliver performance on par with C with a developer experience much closer to Python.

Late last year, two members of the Python Core team proposed integrating Rust into the CPython interpreter and standard library.

The Rust Project reached out with support, and established an ongoing communication channel with core Python developers, PyO3 maintainers, and on the Rust side, Cargo, language, and compiler members. We talked through the challenges they're facing, proposed suggestions, brought in experts, and worked together to address concerns people will raise.

This is an overview of that collaboration, where we're now and what's coming next.

Speakers

Tomáš Šedovič

Rust Program Manager

Tomas has worked in tech for over 20 years, most of it on free and open source software (OpenStack and Kubernetes). More recently, he managed a team making hardware access manageable (Ironic project), and later on, building Linode Kubernetes Engine.

He picked Rust up in 2013, th... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 10:15 - 10:25 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Project Updates

11:05 EDT

Good or Bad Vibes? Coding with AI in Rust

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

Room 511 | 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
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:55 EDT

Fearless Concurrency on the GPU

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

Room 511 | 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
Room 511 | 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

Room 511 | 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

CTO, Medikamind Inc

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
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:50 EDT

Unsafe Rust

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

Room 511 | 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
Room 511 | 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

Room 511 | 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, Honeycomb

Thomas is a software engineer at Honeycomb 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
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

16:50 EDT

Redox OS Update and Demo

Wednesday September 9, 2026 16:50 - 16:55 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Redox OS is a Unix-like operating system written in Rust and community developed. Redox is intended to be a complete alternative to Linux, for the cloud and desktop. We will provide an overview of new features and recent progress, and give a quick demo of programs running on Redox.

Speakers

Ron Williams

President, Redox OS Nonprofit

Ron is the president of the Redox OS nonprofit, and frequent technical contributor. Ron has over 30 years of experience in the software industry, and is now focusing his energy on helping make Redox a success.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 16:50 - 16:55 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Community Lightning Talks

16:55 EDT

Building Rust Africa: From Community to Continent Scale Institution

Wednesday September 9, 2026 16:55 - 17:00 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Rust Africa began as a small, informal developer community and evolved into a structured, cross-continental initiative working to institutionalize Rust across multiple African countries. This talk presents the strategic decisions, governance models, incorporation debates, and operational challenges behind building a sustainable open-source ecosystem in an emerging market context.

Rather than focusing on inspiration, the session examines execution: selecting a jurisdiction for nonprofit incorporation, designing leadership structures to prevent fragmentation, securing partnerships, managing volunteer burnout, and aligning with global Rust ecosystem stakeholders. It also highlights measurable impact, from community expansion to industry engagement.

Attendees will gain an inside look at what it takes to scale a programming language ecosystem where infrastructure, funding, and institutional support are limited. The talk concludes with a practical blueprint for building resilient Rust communities in underrepresented regions, offering lessons applicable beyond Africa.

Speakers

Enow Scott

Project Manager, Adorsys

Scott Enow is a fintech delivery lead and Rust engineer working on safety-critical systems, digital identity, and growing the Rust ecosystem in Africa.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 16:55 - 17:00 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Community Lightning Talks

17:00 EDT

Using the Rust Standard Library on High-End MCUs

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:00 - 17:05 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Most embedded Rust software is no_std. However, as more powerful microcontrollers become available, we may be able to use the Rust standard library to simplify embedded development. Learn what it's like to port and use the Rust standard library in embedded projects, with comparisons against existing no_std and std solutions.

Speakers

Ian McIntyre

Embedded Software Engineer, Freelance

Ian's embedded Rust powers satellites and a few other things here on Earth. Beyond his work, he brings Rust to high-end MCUs through the imxrt-rs project.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:00 - 17:05 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Community Lightning Talks

17:05 EDT

Tips for Speeding Up Cargo Build in CI

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:05 - 17:10 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

The Rust maintenance team has done a lot of work to speed up compilation times, particularly for iterative development, but how can we speed up compilation for situations like CI where we ought to start with a blank slate? This talk will discuss quick, practical tips for easy ways to speed up a CI build.

Speakers

Kaitlin Seng

Lead Software Engineer, Ginger Cybersecurity

Kaitlin has over a decade of experience developing cybersecurity tools with a background spanning applied research and open-source contributions.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:05 - 17:10 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Community Lightning Talks

17:10 EDT

Layered Configuration and Safe Hot Reload in Rust

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:10 - 17:15 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Hot reloading configuration in long-running services is often treated as a file-watching problem. In practice, most failures occur because configuration is mutated in place, partially applied, or insufficiently validated before entering runtime state.

This lightning talk presents a layered configuration model that makes safe hot reload a natural consequence of system design. Configuration flows through clearly separated stages: an operator-facing specification, parsing into an in-memory representation, structured validation, transformation into a runtime representation, and finally an immutable runtime snapshot used by the system.

Each stage produces a distinct representation with an explicit boundary and purpose. Validation happens before the runtime state exists. After validation, the runtime configuration is immutable and can be atomically replaced as a unit.

By separating specification from runtime and relying on immutable snapshots, hot reload becomes a matter of constructing a new validated configuration and swapping it in, rather than mutating global state. Rust’s type system and ownership model make these boundaries explicit and enforceable, reducing the risk of partial updates and inconsistent behavior.

The pattern applies broadly to long-running Rust services that need reliable configuration updates without restarts or shared mutable state.

Speakers

Ethan Hann

Independent Consultant

Ethan Hann (he/him) is a Staff Software Engineer with nearly two decades of experience building distributed systems across healthcare, ad tech, and SaaS. He has led engineering teams, architected multi-tenant platforms serving millions of users, and designed event-driven systems handling... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:10 - 17:15 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Community Lightning Talks

17:15 EDT

Building Efficient Web Scrapers

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:15 - 17:20 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

This talk explores the considerations and design choices for developing efficient web scrapers. It centers on a comparative analysis between Python and Rust. Contrasting Python's ease of use and rich data science ecosystem, with Rust's advantages in performance, memory safety, and concurrency.

Speakers

Camille Gruen

Cloud Engineer

Camille is a cloud engineer. She is passionate about cloud architecture, infrastructure design, and reliable data delivery within geospatial systems. She focuses on building reliable and automated systems that turn complex, raw data into something usable, accessible, and meaningf... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:15 - 17:20 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Community Lightning Talks

17:20 EDT

Implementing a High Performance Serialization Library

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:20 - 17:25 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

This talk introduces wincode, a high-performance Rust serialization library. You’ll learn how hidden copies can sneak into otherwise safe code, how placement initialization helps avoid them, and how compile-time metadata can dramatically improve performance without sacrificing ergonomics or maintainability.

Speakers

Zach Brown

Senior Engineer, Anza

Performance engineer at Anza. Author of the wincode library. Interested in PLT, compilers.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:20 - 17:25 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Community Lightning Talks

17:25 EDT

Zero-copy Transfers with io_uring and Rust

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:25 - 17:30 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

This talk examines the performance costs of epoll-based file-to-socket I/O, including redundant memory copies and excessive syscalls. It then shows how Rust and io_uring achieve high-throughput, low-latency file-to-network transfers using fixed buffers, registered files, and sockets, demonstrated through a practical zero-copy pipeline.

Speakers

Craig Hamilton

Staff Flight Software Engineer, Umbra Lab, Inc.

Craig started programming when he was 13, and still gets excited when developing.

Some highlights of his career have been to architect and develop medical devices that have saved lives, defense software that has been deployed to some of the remotest and hostile locations on the planet to protect our military, and working with astronauts to contribute to the success... Read More →

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:25 - 17:30 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Community Lightning Talks

17:30 EDT

Crates in Firefox Over FFI

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:30 - 17:35 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

We will look at integrating an existing crate (urlpattern) into Firefox's gecko platform (C++) to create a new Web API, and some challenges martialing data across ffi boundary.

Speakers

Ed Guloien

Senior Software Engineer, Mozilla

Ed is a Senior Software Developer on the Networking team at Mozilla, where he is a cookie module peer and spec contributor that works on the Gecko platform under Firefox. He is interested in systems programming, networking protocols, performance and privacy.

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:30 - 17:35 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Community Lightning Talks