RustConf 2026
Tenth anniversary, Montréal, September 8-11
Table of Contents
1. Facts
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Event | RustConf 2026, tenth anniversary |
| Dates | |
| Venue | Palais des Congrès de Montréal, QC, Canada (+ online) |
| Host | Rust Foundation |
| URL | rustconf.com |
| Schedule | rustconf2026.sched.com |
| Attending | yes, 1 guest |
Day shape: workshops and summits on the 8th, talks on the 9th and 10th, UnConference on the 11th (separate registration, sold out).
Correction to my own note. I had the 8th down as "workshops / Async Day + badge pickup". Badge pickup and workshops are confirmed, but neither the workshops page nor the additional-events page mentions an Async Day. What the 8th actually carries besides workshops is the Rust Teams Health Summit (09:00–17:00, invitation only) and a Career Crawl (17:00–18:30).
2. Workshops — Tuesday the 8th
All at the venue, USD 290 each, separate registration.
| Time | Workshop | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00–12:30 | Practical Actor-Based Concurrency in Async Rust | Herbert Wolverson, Ardan Labs |
| 09:00–12:30 | Hello, Kernel! Linux Driver Development in Rust, Part 1 | Alexandru Radovici, Politehnica Bucharest |
| 09:00–12:30 | Using Advent of Code as an FFI Playground | Alyssa Evans, Ditto |
| 13:30–17:00 | C→Rust, Beyond the Basics | Luca Palmieri, Mainmatter |
| 13:30–17:00 | Hello, Kernel! Part 2 | Alexandru Radovici |
Both kernel parts bundle at USD 450.
3. Keynotes
- Rust Adoption at Scale With Ubuntu — Jon Seager (Wed 09:15)
- Rust, In Sickness & In Health — Bryan Cantrill (Thu 09:00)
- Fireside: Stewarding Rust & Python — Rebecca Rumbul and Deb Nicholson (Thu 16:35)
4. Selected sessions
Grouped by thread rather than by clock. Full grid on sched.
4.1. Verification and proof
The densest thread, and the reason to go.
- Verifying the Rust Standard Library: A Year of Proofs, Tools, and Winners — Felipe Monteiro (Thu 10:20)
- The Safety-Critical Rust Consortium Two Years In — Pete LeVasseur (Thu 09:40)
- BorrowSanitizer: Securing Rust Across Foreign Function Boundaries — Ian McCormack (Thu 11:50)
- Detecting Borrow and Provenance Bugs Across Unsafe Rust and C/C++ — Joannah Nanjekye (Wed 11:55)
- Automating C++ to Rust Equivalence Proofs — Amelia Payne (Wed 15:40, Community Room)
- Unsafe Rust — Robert C. Seacord (Wed 14:50)
4.2. C and C++ migration
- Zngur: Simplified Rust/C++ Integration — David Sankel (Wed 11:05)
- From C++ APIs to Idiomatic Rust — Divya Chakarwarti (Wed 14:50)
- Migrating RediSearch from C to Rust — Jonas Kruckenberg (Wed 16:00)
- Crates in Firefox Over FFI — Ed Guloien (Wed 17:30)
- TARmageddon: Reflections on a Multi-Crate CVE — Alex Zenla (Thu 14:35)
4.3. Kernel, GPU, and the metal
- Compiling the Linux Kernel with gccrs — Pierre-Emmanuel Patry, Arthur Cohen (Wed 14:00)
- Tyr: A New Rust GPU Driver for the Linux Kernel — Daniel Almeida (Thu 15:45)
- Making GPUs Feel Native in Rust — Christian Legnitto (Thu 11:00)
- Fearless Concurrency on the GPU — Melih Elibol (Wed 11:55)
- Zero-copy Transfers with io_uring and Rust — Craig Hamilton (Wed 17:25)
- Using the Rust Standard Library on High-End MCUs — Ian McIntyre (Wed 17:00)
- Beyond the &: A Future for Native Smart Pointers in Rust — Tyler Mandry (Thu 15:45)
4.4. AI-assisted Rust
First year this is a visible track rather than a stray talk.
- Good or Bad Vibes? Coding with AI in Rust — Lisa Crossman (Wed 11:05)
- How to Test AI-generated Code for Unintended Behavior — Teymour Aldridge, Antithesis (Thu 12:45, sponsored demo)
- Agentic Performance Engineering — Arthur Pastel, CodSpeed (Thu 10:40, sponsored demo)
- Scaling Infrastructure With Confidence in the Age of AI — Emma Forman Ling, Convex (Wed 10:05)
4.5. Governance and project direction
- *Project Goals : Funding
- Chocolate : Peanut Butter* — Nicholas Matsakis (Thu 10:00)
- (no term)
- A Decade of Rustls — Joe Birr-Pixton, Daniel McCarney (Wed 09:55)
- (no term)
- Bringing Rust into Python — Tomáš Šedovič (Wed 10:15)
- (no term)
- The Future of Rust in Academia — Mordecai Etukudo, Bart Massey (Wed 14:50)
4.6. Applied and odd
- Simulating a Million Patients: Realistic Health Data Generation in Rust — Caroline Morton (Thu 11:00)
- Reverse Engineering Rust Malware in 2026 — Cindy Xiao (Wed 14:00)
- Tokio, Rayon, and the GPU: Profiling a Radiology AI Pipeline — Eric Karl (Wed 14:00)
- Oxidizing Fields of Mistria, a Post-Mortem — Jonathan Spira (Thu 15:45)
- Listening to the Radio with Rust — Thomas Eckert (Wed 16:00)
- Tick Tock: Maintaining Time — Jacob Pratt (Thu 14:35)
- Servo Devtools: Where Rust Meets JavaScript — Rakhi Sharma (Thu 13:45)
5. Why to attend
Three threads land on work already in this corpus.
Verification tooling has caught up to the ambition. A year of proofs against the standard library, plus BorrowSanitizer and automated C++/Rust equivalence proofs, is the first RustConf where the verification track is about shipped tools rather than intent. That is the same shift the Rebuild-Five work kept running into: the expensive artifact is the spec, and the tools that grade it are what make a rebuild cheap.
Antithesis is presenting on testing AI-generated code (session). Deterministic simulation testing is already the reference point in the Goldberry invariant work; hearing how they frame AI-authored code is worth the slot.
The FFI boundary is the recurring subject. BorrowSanitizer, Zngur, provenance bugs across unsafe Rust and C, Firefox crates over FFI — four talks on the same seam. That seam is where the JSON key-representation defect kept appearing in a different guise: a boundary where two type systems disagree and neither side raises an error.
6. Additional events
| Day | Event | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Tue 8 | Badge collection | --- |
| Tue 8 | Rust Teams Health Summit (invitation only) | 09:00–17:00 |
| Tue 8 | Career Crawl (Solana) | 17:00–18:30 |
| Wed 9 | Expo hall opens | 09:00 |
| Wed 9 | Evening reception, ten years of RustConf | 18:00, Salon 720-730 |
| Thu 10 | C++ to Rust Translations Meetup (limited) | 10:30 |
| Thu 10 | Meet & greets: Rust Foundation, RCN, RFTT, Rust ecosystem | 13:00–13:30 |
| Fri 11 | UnConference (sold out) | 09:00 |