RustConf 2026: Full Schedule

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11:00 EDT

Simulating a Million Patients: Realistic Health Data Generation in Rust

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

Room 510ac | 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
Room 510ac | 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

Room 510ac | 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
Room 510ac | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

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

Room 510ac | 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 Platform 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
Room 510ac | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

14:35 EDT

Tick Tock: Maintaining Time

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

Room 510ac | 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
Room 510ac | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

15:45 EDT

Oxidizing Fields of Mistria, a Post-Mortem

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

Room 510ac | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Over the course of 2025 and 2026, Fields of Mistria transitioned from using GameMaker Studio 2 to using our own custom Rust game engine, called maybe. We released our first public beta in early June. On August 5th, Fields of Mistria released to the general public on Steam, sporting its new engine. We ported to improve performance, increase modability, and to handle engine-side bugs which we could not fix ourselves, including segfaults in GameMaker Studio 2's C++ runtime.

This talk is a post-mortem of what went right, what went wrong, and what we should have done before it was released. Expect discussions on graphics, windowing and sound libraries, managing C dependencies on Linux and Windows, crash handlers, feedback mechanisms for users, and, finally, whether we succeeded in our three goals. Spoilers: we have never had a segfault.

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
Room 510ac | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions