RustConf 2026

RustConf 2026

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

11:00 EDT

Making GPUs Feel Native in Rust

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

Palais des Congrès de Montréal

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

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

15:45 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

RustConf 2026

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