RustConf 2026: Full Schedule

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

Sponsored Lightning Talks

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

Sponsored Lightning Talks

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

17:45 EDT

Closing Remarks

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:45 - 17:50 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Wednesday September 9, 2026 17:45 - 17:50 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Keynotes

09:00 EDT

Keynote: Rust, In Sickness & In Health

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:00 - 09:30 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

What does it actually mean to bet a company on a particular programming language? Seven years ago, Bryan Cantrill helped start Oxide Computer Company with Rust at the center of that bet, and spent the years since finding out the answer to this question.
In this talk, Bryan will share how his thinking about Rust has evolved, from the earliest infatuation to the honeymoon to the many ups and several downs of a long, deep relationship with the language, tested across bootloaders, an operating system, a hypervisor, a distributed storage system, a network operating system, compilers, and debuggers. Bryan will get into where he thinks Rust is strong, where it still has real gaps, and what he thinks the language and ecosystem need to prioritize as Rust moves further into systems’ future.

Speakers

Bryan Cantrill

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Oxide Computer

Bryan Cantrill is a software engineer who has spent three decades at the hardware/software interface. He is the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company, which builds rack-scale computers for the post-cloud era. Prior to Oxide, he spent nearly a decade at Joyent, a cloud computing... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:00 - 09:30 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Keynotes

09:30 EDT

Sponsored Lightning Talk - Microsoft: Rust (in production) Without Fear

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:30 - 09:35 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Rust at Microsoft is on a super-accelerated trajectory nowadays. But what does it take to embrace Rust in the enterprise: what are the gaps, the systems we needed to reengineer for Rust, to make it fit into a world that has never seen the likes of crabs?
2026: Are we Rust yet?

Speakers

Victor Ciura

Technical Lead for Rust Program @ Microsoft, Microsoft

Victor Ciura is a Principal Engineer on the Rust tooling team in Microsoft DevDiv, building the compiler toolchain and libraries needed for the broader 🦀 oxidation effort across the organization and open-source community.

Spent the last 25 years doing systems programming in C... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:30 - 09:35 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Sponsored Lightning Talks

09:35 EDT

Sponsored Lightning Talk - Peeriot: Myrmic: An Open Rust Runtime for Distributed Edge Applications

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:35 - 09:40 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Myrmic is an open-source runtime for distributed edge applications. It provides execution, messaging, state handling, and placement for application logic running across heterogeneous edge and embedded devices, without requiring a central cloud service in the control path.

This lightning talk introduces two core aspects of the system. First, Myrmic provides a complete runtime stack for building and coordinating distributed applications across the edge. Second, its dual-engine architecture separates portable, sandboxed application logic from device-specific native Rust code, allowing applications to span gateways and microcontrollers without hiding hardware capabilities behind a lowest-common-denominator abstraction.

In five minutes, attendees will get a compact view of the overall stack, the dual-engine design, the capabilities it enables, and the trade-offs it introduces. Myrmic is open source, and the implementation will be available after the session.

Speakers

Ralf Hüskes

CEO, Peeriot

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:35 - 09:40 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Sponsored Lightning Talks

09:40 EDT

Project Update: The Safety-Critical Rust Consortium Two Years In

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:40 - 09:50 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

The Safety-Critical Rust Consortium (SCRC) was kicked off two years ago, amazingly enough, at RustConf 2024 right here in Montreal. In this talk Pete will recap (briskly!) the last two years of the SCRC, the great work that's been accomplished and the road that lies ahead for getting Rust into more planes, trains, and automobiles. Rust has earned respect in helping to improve the quality of software through its memory-, type-, and thread-safety without doubt. However, there do remain regulatory and compliance items which the SCRC is actively working together on to expand the usage of Rust to safety-critical domains and higher levels of safety-criticality.

Speakers

Pete LeVasseur

Staff Software Engineer, Woven by Toyota

Pete LeVasseur guides Rust adoption efforts at Woven by Toyota and its suitability for the highest levels of safety-criticality. He’s also lead of the Safety-Critical Rust Consortium, which has a broad base of support for making Rust a suitable first-language choice for safety-critical... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:40 - 09:50 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Project Updates

09:50 EDT

Sponsored Lightning Talk - Dash0: The Power of Profiling: How Fixing One Async Antipattern Shaved Off 30% of Our Write Latency

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:50 - 09:55 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Dash0's Great Lakes database was overusing tokio::task::block_in_place, which accounted for a surprisingly large amount of both CPU usage and write latency. In this talk, Brennan will discuss how we pinpointed the issue using our Continuous Profiling product, how we fixed it, and what it means for other resource-conscious Rust users.

Speakers

Brennan Vincent

Staff Software Engineer, Dash0

Brennan is a software engineer who has worked at Amazon, Meta, Materialize, Polar Signals and now Dash0. He is particularly interested in low-level systems like databases and kernels, and has focused on performance, efficiency and reliability throughout his career. He's also been... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:50 - 09:55 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Sponsored Lightning Talks

09:55 EDT

Sponsored Lightning Talk: OneChronos - Rust in Finance

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:55 - 10:00 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Using Rust to build the next generation of trading systems and ensure that they are fast, secure, and correct.

Speakers

Matt Plant

Software Engineer, OneChronos

Thursday September 10, 2026 09:55 - 10:00 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Sponsored Lightning Talks

10:00 EDT

Project Goals : Funding :: Chocolate : Peanut Butter

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

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Project Goals and funding are two good things that are far better together. The Rust Foundation and the Rust Project are working together to build a sustainable pipeline that turns the growing demand for Rust into increasing funding, both for general maintenance and for important project goals (pun definitely intended). Niko will walk through the pieces already in place, from the Foundation's Maintainer Fund to the Maintainer-in-Residence program, and how the Project Goals program helps the whole community, funders and maintainers alike, align on priorities together.

Speakers

Nicholas Matsakis

Senior Principal Engineer, AWS

Thursday September 10, 2026 10:00 - 10:10 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Project Updates

10:10 EDT

Sponsored Lightning Talk - Google: How We Replace Common C⁠ and C++ Libraries with Rust at Scale

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

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Google depends on a lot of C and C++ libraries for fundamental tasks like image and audio decoding. Unfortunately, due to the nature of C and C++ these libraries are suspect to a large amount of memory safety vulnerabilities and are generally considered unsafe. To address this security risk, our team at Google moved all these common parsing and decoding libraries over to Rust alternatives. We use Crubit to expose a C++ interface for these libraries and then change the callsites to use the Rust alternative. We will talk about a wrapper for image-rs as an example for our efforts.

Speakers

Maria Pospelova

Software Engineer, Google

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

Sponsored Lightning Talks

10:15 EDT

Sponsored Lightning Talk - Cognition AI: Making the Web Work Natively

Thursday September 10, 2026 10:15 - 10:20 EDT

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Rust can run everywhere: on servers, desktops, phones, microcontrollers, and even web browsers. The popular web-sys and wasm-bindgen projects enable Rust to bind natively to web APIs, unlocking fullstack web applications written entirely in Rust. Developers get blazing fast performance, typesafe interfaces, and powerful compile time checks that improve reliability.
However, there’s a catch - UI frameworks and libraries written for the web only work on the web… until now. In this talk we’ll explore how Dioxus’ new wry-bindgen project unlocks the full ecosystem of web APIs on all platforms, making it easier than ever to build web, desktop, and mobile apps in Rust.

Speakers

Jonathan Kelley

Product Engineer, Cognition AI

Thursday September 10, 2026 10:15 - 10:20 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Sponsored Lightning Talks

10:20 EDT

Verifying the Rust Standard Library: A Year of Proofs, Tools, and Winners

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

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Over the past year, the Rust community did something remarkable: contributors from across industry, academia, and open source came together to formally verify the safety of the Rust standard library at a scale never attempted before. In this talk, Felipe Monteiro shares what the community has collectively achieved and announces the winners of the latest verification challenges. Highlights include over 11,000 functions now machine-proved free of key memory-safety violations, a new tool that generated more proof harnesses in weeks than manual effort produced in over a year, and a contribution that helped land function contracts as an experimental Rust language feature. He'll also show how the effort has grown into a tool-agnostic contest — now spanning verifiers such as Kani, VeriFast, ESBMC, and Flux — and walk through the new challenges open to the community today. Come celebrate the people who made it happen, and find out how to get involved.

Speakers

Felipe Monteiro

Senior Applied Scientist, Automated Reasoning Group, AWS

Felipe R. Monteiro is a Senior Applied Scientist at AWS, where he builds formal verification technology for C and Rust. He is a lead developer of the Kani Rust Verifier and a committee member of the Rust standard library verification project — the community effort to formally prove... Read More →

Thursday September 10, 2026 10:20 - 10:30 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Community Lightning Talks

11:00 EDT

Making GPUs Feel Native in Rust

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

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

GPUs power AI, graphics, scientific computing, and an increasing share of modern software. Many projects focus on making GPU programming in Rust possible. This talk asks a different question: how do we make GPU programming feel native to Rust?

Christian Legnitto, founder and CEO of VectorWare, explores what it would take to make GPUs feel natural extension of the Rust language and ecosystem. The talk covers the challenges and design tradeoffs involved in bringing Rust's ownership model, type system, and abstractions to heterogeneous systems. It also looks at compiler architecture, intermediate representations (IRs), runtimes, and the fundamental differences between CPU and GPU execution.

Attendees will leave with a framework for thinking about how GPU and CPU software interact, an understanding of today's tradeoffs, and a vision for how Rust can make heterogeneous programming feel like ordinary systems programming.

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
Room 511 | 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

Room 511 | 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. Probe, Validate, Execute
3. SeqCst + Single Total Order
4. False Sharing
5. True Sharing

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
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

13:45 EDT

Real-Time Rust in Robotics

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

Room 511 | 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
Room 511 | 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

Room 511 | 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
Room 511 | 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

Room 511 | 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
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Breakout Sessions

16:35 EDT

Fireside Chat - Stewarding Rust & Python

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

Room 511 | 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, Rust Foundation

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
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Keynotes

17:20 EDT

Closing Remarks

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

Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Thursday September 10, 2026 17:20 - 17:30 EDT
Room 511 | Palais des Congrès de Montréal

Keynotes

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