RustConf 2026: Full Schedule

11:05 EDT

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

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

Room 510ac | 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
Room 510ac | 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

Room 510ac | 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
Room 510ac | 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

Room 510ac | 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
Room 510ac | 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

Room 510ac | 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
Room 510ac | 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

Room 510ac | 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
Room 510ac | 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

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