RustConf 2026: Full Schedule

GPUs power some of the most important workloads in computing, yet they still feel foreign in Rust. Today Rust can program GPUs, adapting to GPU-native models. This talk explores the inverse: making GPUs Rust-native, where the hardware feels like a natural part of the language.

Speakers

Christian Legnitto

Founder, VectorWare

Christian Legnitto is the founder of VectorWare, the first GPU-native software company. Previously he worked at Apple, Mozilla, Facebook, and Robinhood.

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:00 - 11:40 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:00 EDT

Rust: The First 10 Years Were the Easiest

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:00 - 11:40 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

We spent more than 10 years proving that Rust works. We focused on memory safety, async, and moved from a niche experiment to the Linux Kernel.

But building a revolution was easier than maintaining a global standard. As we head toward 2027, the "honeymoon" phase is over, and we are now facing the real challenges: managing decentralized governance, navigating corporate pressure, continuously evolving the language without breaking everything, and addressing technical debt.

This session is a reality check on what happens when a language as disruptive as Rust becomes the establishment. Let’s skip the basics and focus on the system issues that will define the next 10 and more years of Rust. You thought the climb was hard, but now the real game begins.

Speakers

Francesco Ciulla

Head of DevRel, Zerops

Francesco is a developer, runner, teacher and speaker, based in Rome, Italy. He's on Twitter too much and loves making videos on YouTube.
From 2017 to 2021, he worked as a Fullstack Developer at the European Space Agency on the Copernicus project.
By 2021, Francesco decided to quit... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:00 - 11:40 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:00 EDT

Simulating a Million Patients: Realistic Health Data Generation in Rust

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:00 - 11:40 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Healthcare researchers desperately need realistic synthetic patient data: for teaching, for testing analysis pipelines, and for sharing results without compromising real patients' privacy. But generating data that's actually realistic is surprisingly hard. Naïve approaches produce patients who are statistically implausible: twenty-year-olds with dementia, smokers whose blood pressure is unaffected by their habit, populations where diabetes and hypertension never co-occur.

This talk presents a graph-based approach to synthetic patient generation, built in Rust, that models how diseases actually progress through a human life. Using directed acyclic graphs with age-banded transition probabilities, the system walks each simulated patient through decades of accumulating risk factors, diagnoses, and complications, producing population-level data that preserves the statistical relationships epidemiologists rely on.

We'll trace a concrete clinical scenario, elderly patients developing diabetes, then hypertension, then suffering a transient ischaemic attack, from its representation as a DAG, through its implementation in Rust, to its output as a million-row dataset. Along the way, we'll cover the Rust design decisions that made this tractable: strong types that prevent impossible patient states, seeded RNG for scientific reproducibility, and the adaptor pattern that lets the same patient model emit records in different clinical formats.

You don't need a medical background to follow this talk. You'll leave with transferable patterns for modelling complex real-world processes as graphs, and a new appreciation for why Rust's type system is a gift to scientific computing.

Speakers

Dr. Caroline Morton

Senior Software Consultant / Epidemiologist, Parakeet Consulting

Dr. Caroline Morton is a medical doctor, epidemiologist, and senior rust software engineer working at the intersection of public health and modern software. She is the founder of two companies, the author of over 70 academic papers and two books, and the creator of open-source tools... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:00 - 11:40 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:50 EDT

BorrowSanitizer: Securing Rust Across Foreign Function Boundaries

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:50 - 12:30 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

From the Linux Kernel to Chromium, Rust is increasingly finding its way into security-critical C++ applications. Developers who interoperate with these languages need to use Rust’s unsafe features to bypass the restrictions of the borrow checker. However, when unsafe code is used incorrectly, it can break the compiler’s assumptions about aliasing, leading to silent, “impossible” forms of undefined behavior that can cause critical errors at run-time. Miri—Rust’s de-facto bug-finding tool—has high overhead and limited support for foreign function calls, which prevents it from finding these errors in multilanguage applications. We are creating BorrowSanitizer: a new dynamic bug-finding tool for finding violations of Rust’s newest “Tree Borrows” aliasing model in applications that interoperate with C++.

Speakers

Ian McCormack

PhD Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University

Ian McCormack is a PhD candidate in Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on making Rust interoperation easier.

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:50 - 12:30 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:50 EDT

Rust Atomics in the Wild: Memory Ordering Design Patterns from Popular Crates

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:50 - 12:30 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Modern Rust codebases use atomics for much more than simple shared-state coordination. When multiple atomics interact, subtle behaviors can appear that are easy to miss and can look arbitrary at first. With a closer view, a small set of recurring patterns shows up across many production systems, and those patterns can be applied deliberately to solve nuanced coordination problems when both correctness and performance matter.

This talk classifies these patterns by starting with a short refresher on Rust’s atomic memory model, then framing the problems being solved, describing the minimal structure of each pattern, and connecting it to real implementations in widely used Rust crates and runtimes

The five patterns covered are:
1. Publish and consume with Release and Acquire
2. One time initialization and fast paths,
3. CAS driven state machines for coordination
4. Handoff via RMW and release sequences
5. Snapshot style reads using sequence counters and index publication.

Attendees will see common pitfalls, what correctness argument each ordering supports, and where performance wins or losses typically come from. The goal is to make memory ordering choices reviewable, explainable, and repeatable.

Speakers

Martin Ombura Jr.

Senior Software Engineer, Scarlaria LLC

Martin Ombura Jr. is a Senior Backend Software Engineer who has worked with Rust since 2019, with a focus on building reliable systems. At GoDaddy, he contributed to the initial adoption of Rust in the backend stack. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:50 - 12:30 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

11:50 EDT

Rust for ML Infrastructure: A Case Study in Building an ONNX Runtime

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:50 - 12:30 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

What does it take to build a machine learning inference engine in Rust - and what does that experience reveal about Rust as a language for ML infrastructure?

This talk presents lessons learned from designing and implementing a GPU-accelerated ONNX runtime in Rust. The project, Onyxia, parses ONNX graphs, compiles them through a multi-pass pipeline, generates WGSL compute shaders, and executes them via wgpu across desktop, mobile, and the web.

The session focuses on how Rust's language, tooling, and ecosystem made the project possible. A friendly compiler and a strong type system make working with graphs a joy. Tests and documentation colocated with the code make it easy to understand the internals of the crates. Together, these properties make it possible to build a runtime that is both efficient and understandable.

The talk also reflects on Rust's growing adoption in machine learning infrastructure and the ecosystem crates that make such projects practical today.

Speakers

Ada Hieta

Applied AI Engineer, Softlandia

Ada is an Applied AI Engineer at Softlandia. She has worked on multiple ML-related projects, including LLMs, imaging, and optical metrology.

Thursday September 10, 2026 11:50 - 12:30 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

12:30 EDT

🍴 Lunch Break

Thursday September 10, 2026 12:30 - 13:45 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Thursday September 10, 2026 12:30 - 13:45 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breaks

13:45 EDT

2 Hours to 10 Minutes: Building Rust Monorepos at Scale with Bazel RBE

Thursday September 10, 2026 13:45 - 14:25 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

A Rust monorepo with multiple workspaces and a CI pipeline that routinely exceeded two hours with recurrent flaky results. After five iterations — GitHub Actions tuning, shell script hacks, self-hosted Prow and a custom Rust-based orchestrator — each improvement eventually hit a ceiling, until the team spent more time debugging CI than shipping code.

This talk is about the infrastructure that broke the cycle: Bazel Remote Build Execution on self-hosted bare metal, bringing CI under ten minutes. Engineers can choose to use Cargo or Bazel locally — no workflow disruption.

The talk walks through what was built, why each previous approach hit its ceiling, and what running an RBE cluster for Rust actually looks like in production.

Speakers

Loïs Postula

Chief Information Officer, Foresight Spatial Labs

DevOps engineer from Belgium with nearly 10 years of experience, 4 spent in a Rust-only organisation. Builds and operates CI/CD infrastructure, and automates everything that stands still long enough. Open source believer.

Thursday September 10, 2026 13:45 - 14:25 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

13:45 EDT

Real-Time Rust in Robotics

Thursday September 10, 2026 13:45 - 14:25 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Robots are complex interconnections of subsystems which use a varied mix of software. David will describe a typical robot's architecture and highlight the areas where Rust is making headway. He will present his team's experience with bringing Rust to the low-level sensors and actuators on a research robotics platform, showing how the use of bare-metal Rust improved the system's reliability and real-time performance. Finally, he will suggest how the Rust community can encourage further adoption of Rust in robotics and related applications.

Speakers

David Lawrence

Roboticist, Robotics and AI Institute

David Lawrence is a roboticist at the Robotics and AI Institute in Cambridge, MA, USA, and was previously a senior principal electrical & firmware engineer at Markforged Inc. He received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in mathematics, electrical engineering, and computer science from the... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 13:45 - 14:25 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

13:45 EDT

Servo Devtools: Where Rust Meets JavaScript

Thursday September 10, 2026 13:45 - 14:25 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust, one of the largest and oldest Rust projects out there. One of the areas we’re actively pushing forward is DevTools support, connecting Servo to Firefox DevTools over the Remote Debug Protocol. This means writing a server in Rust that speaks with a client written in Javascript.

Every browser engine needs DevTools, but building them is a project in itself. In this talk we’ll look at what building DevTools for Servo looks like. The Inspector, the Console, the Debugger. What are the hard parts and what challenges we face. How we navigate a client written in JS, a server written in Rust, and the role SpiderMonkey(C++) and mozjs(Rust) play in making it all work.

Speakers

Rakhi Sharma

Engineer, Igalia

Rakhi is a software engineer at Igalia, where she works on the Servo Browser engine. She is based in Germany, and is interested in the web, browsers, and engines.

Thursday September 10, 2026 13:45 - 14:25 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:35 EDT

TARmageddon: Reflections on a Multi-Crate CVE

Thursday September 10, 2026 14:35 - 15:15 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

What happens when several people create popular forks of a Rust project and then a vulnerability impacts all of them? When we found a parsing vulnerability in tokio-tar, dubbed TARmageddon, we discovered how a simple oversight in TAR parsing logic can yield dangerous behavior... and then we discovered the widespread impact. We’ll walk through this vulnerability and how the responsible disclosure ended up sent to four different projects. We’ll look at how this disclosure became a scavenger hunt for maintainer email addresses, popular forks, and dependent projects.

We'll then evaluate why this kind of forking might be more common in Rust and how the synchronous/asynchronous divide can result in disparate forks of Rust projects, exploring methodologies to eliminate async/sync separation in common libraries.

Speakers

Alex Zenla

CTO, Edera

Alex is a Founder & CTO at Edera, building technology for securing containers using hypervisors in Rust. She has contributed to many open source projects including Chromium, Chromium OS, Dart, and Ubuntu, some as early as 11 years old. Alex started in the corporate world at the age... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 14:35 - 15:15 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:35 EDT

Tick Tock: Maintaining Time

Thursday September 10, 2026 14:35 - 15:15 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Learn what goes into maintaining a foundational crate in the Rust ecosystem, from API design to constructing algorithms from scratch and catching bugs before they're noticed. An overview of recent optimizations, handling of security vulnerabilities, and some more niche topics will be covered as well!

Speakers

Jacob Pratt

Senior Software Engineer

Contributor to Rust's compiler and standard library. Maintainer of widely-used crates in the Rust ecosystem.

Thursday September 10, 2026 14:35 - 15:15 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:35 EDT

Writing a Zero-Copy Database Parser from the Ground Up

Thursday September 10, 2026 14:35 - 15:15 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Building a high-performance database proxy demands wire-speed parsing with minimal overhead. This talk walks through the design and implementation of a zero-copy streaming parser in Rust that parses database wire protocols incrementally from the first byte received, using a fixed-size ring buffer and arena-allocated borrow tracking to yield structured slices directly into the network buffer with no intermediate copies and constant memory regardless of payload size.

The talk covers the core abstraction: a trait-based streaming API that uses Rust's type system to bind borrowed slices to the underlying ring buffer at compile time, a ring buffer designed to allow concurrent immutable borrows of disjoint regions across async yields, and a borrow tracker that manages lifetimes as the buffer is refilled. Attendees will see how a small ring buffer can parse and inspect every byte of an arbitrarily large payload, how deterministic pattern matching eliminates backtracking on partial reads, and where carefully scoped unsafe makes the design sound.

Speakers

Devon Tietjen

Co-Founder, CEO & CTO, Eden

Devon is the co-founder and CTO at Eden, where he leads the development of database and networking infrastructure products. Devon has been programming since 9, with an interest in embedded programming, distributed systems, algorithms, and protocols.

Thursday September 10, 2026 14:35 - 15:15 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

15:15 EDT

☕️ Afternoon Break

Thursday September 10, 2026 15:15 - 15:45 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Thursday September 10, 2026 15:15 - 15:45 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breaks

15:45 EDT

Beyond the &: A Future for Native Smart Pointers in Rust

Thursday September 10, 2026 15:45 - 16:25 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Rust is often described as a "library-first language," yet user-defined smart pointers are second-class compared to built-in types like &, &mut, and Box. These native types enjoy special privileges, like integration with the borrow checker, that ordinary library types like Arc, RefCell, and PyRef cannot currently replicate. These limitations make Rust much clunkier than it has to be. They also prevent powerful concepts like in-place initialization from being expressed safely.

This talk presents an update on the "Beyond the &" roadmap, an initiative to bridge these gaps. We explore how exposing the borrow checker's fundamental primitives allows us to generalize standard "superpowers" to user-defined types. We discuss plans to extend the reference model itself by investigating new types like &own and &uninit, which aim to solve long-standing issues with safe in-place construction.

By mapping out these primitives, we enable a future where pointer types like VolatilePtr and CppRef – as well as wrapper types like Cell and MaybeUninit – are as ergonomic to use as builtin types. This creates powerful new patterns for systems programming, interoperability, and abstraction.

Speakers

Tyler Mandry

Staff Software Engineer, Google

Tyler co-leads the Rust Language Design team and works on Rust at Google, most recently focusing on language interop and async.

Thursday September 10, 2026 15:45 - 16:25 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

15:45 EDT

Oxidizing Fields of Mistria

Thursday September 10, 2026 15:45 - 16:25 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Fields of Mistria, a cozy 2D pixel-art farming-sim, was released in Early Access in 2025 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. We use a substantial amount of Rust at NPC Studio, both in development and at runtime. This talk will cover how we started using Rust and how it has evolved during Early Access.

Speakers

Jonathan Spira

Lead Programmer, NPC Studio

Jonathan Spira is a game developer, programmer, and designer based in New York and Philadelphia. He started working in games in 2018 and has worked on Fields of Mistria since 2021.

Thursday September 10, 2026 15:45 - 16:25 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

15:45 EDT

Tyr: A New Rust GPU Driver for the Linux Kernel

Thursday September 10, 2026 15:45 - 16:25 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

This talk will discuss the new Rust kernel driver for Arm Mali GPUs. We will start by introducing the Linux GPU stack and follow with a brief overview on how modern GPUs work. This will segue into a discussion about the current status of the Tyr driver and its surrounding infrastructure, including other Rust GPU drivers for the Linux kernel. We will conclude by discussing the future plans for the project and touch upon some of the issues that are still at large.

Speakers

Daniel Almeida

Consultant Software Engineer, Collabora

Daniel Almeida is a Software Engineer at Collabora, a consultancy that specializes in delivering the benefits of open source software to the commercial world. He mainly works on the Linux kernel and his latest project is Tyr, a Rust GPU kernel driver for the 10th+ generation of Arm... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 15:45 - 16:25 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

16:35 EDT

Fireside Chat - Stewarding Rust & Python

Thursday September 10, 2026 16:35 - 17:20 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

What does it take to steward two of the world's most widely used programming languages — and what can Rust and Python learn from each other?
To close RustConf 2026, the executive leaders of the Rust Foundation and the Python Software Foundation sit down for a candid conversation on the challenges facing open source communities today: AI's impact on language ecosystems, cross-ecosystem interoperability, security priorities, governance lessons, and how to lead global communities in a rapidly changing world.

Speakers

Dr. Rebecca Rumbul

Executive Director & CEO, Rust Foundation

Dr. Rebecca Rumbul leads the Rust Foundation as Executive Director & CEO. She holds a Ph.D. 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... Read More →

Deb Nicholson

Executive Director, Python Software Foundation

Deb Nicholson is a free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Executive Director at the Python Software Foundation which serves as the non-profit steward of the Python programming language. She has previously served the open source ecosystem through... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 16:35 - 17:20 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Keynotes

17:20 EDT

Closing Remarks

Thursday September 10, 2026 17:20 - 17:30 EDT

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Thursday September 10, 2026 17:20 - 17:30 EDT
Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Keynotes

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