đŚ RustConf Like No Other
Todayâs Issue: Faster Rust Builds on Mac, Adding #[derive(From)] to Rust, and Dealing With Cancel Safety in Async Rust
Hello, Rustaceans
I hope you had a productive first week of September. Letâs learn!
In this issue, weâll recap how RustConf 2025 went down in Seattle last week, present a Q&A interview, spotlight an amazing Rust project, and share 10 incredible links of the week.
Hereâs issue 83 for you!
MAIN NEWS
đŚ RustConf Like No Other
This yearâs RustConf was nothing short of extraordinary, from the talks and enthusiastic Rustaceans to the hands-on workshops, side activities, and yes, even the food.
Big-name companies came out in full force: Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Zed Industries, Oracle, Polar Signals, and others were well represented, showing just how deeply Rust is taking root.
We also had the chance to meet some of our readers(and even convert a few new ones along the way). But enough of my personal rambling, letâs look at some of the standout talks from the conference.
We kicked things off Tuesday with Async Day workshops, featuring bold sessions on Async Design Patterns and Async Rust & C++ Interop. It was the kind of hands-on sweat equity that makes you question every .await youâve ever written, in the best way possible.
Keynotes that interested me:
âRust at the Last Mile in Healthcareâ by Ally Salim Jr was the talk Iâd been most excited about heading into the conference and it didnât disappoint. Practical and deeply human, it wasnât about technology for technologyâs sake. Instead, it showed how Rust can matter in environments where resources are scarce, equipment is outdated, and reliability is literally a matter of health. The emphasis on accessibility and resilience grounded the talk in reality, reminding me that software choices can directly impact lives when infrastructure is fragile.
âFrom Blue Screens to Orange Crabs: Microsoftâs Rusty Revolutionâ by Mark Russinovich felt confident and optimistic. He presented Microsoftâs adoption of Rust as both pragmatic and necessary. Balancing corporate strategy with technical reality, the talk left me convinced that this shift has genuine momentum.
âHigh-Level Rust and the Future of Application Developmentâ by Jonathan Kelly was engaging in its own way, showcasing what Dioxus can do with hot-reloading and tooling improvements. It gave the room a glimpse of a future where building applications in Rust feels more accessible, fast-moving, and enjoyable for everyday developers.
âVision Doc: The Next 10 Years of Rustâ by Nicholas Matsakis and Jack Huey carried a forward-looking tone. Reflecting on Rustâs growth while carefully outlining future directions, it felt like a roadmap shaped with the community in mind: clear, grounded, and inspiring confidence in Rustâs long-term stability.
Marquee show-stoppers
Nathaniel Simardâs âRust for AI & Accelerated Computingâ was both timely and ambitious. With Burn and CubeCL, he showed how Rust is carving out a space in machine learning, where performance and safety often clash. The demo didnât feel like a distant promise, it felt usable today if youâre serious about building high-performance AI systems without giving up Rustâs guardrails.
Marco Ieniâs âHow We Made the Rust CI 75% Cheaperâ was a nuts-and-bolts session that resonated with anyone running infrastructure at scale. It wasnât flashy, but it was practical. Key takeaways: smarter caching, pipeline optimizations, and rethinking defaults, were the kind of lessons you could bring back to your team on Monday and put to work immediately.
Jeremy Sollerâs â10 Years of Redox OS and Rustâ leaned nostalgic, reflecting on how far both Redox and Rust have come since their scrappy beginnings. For longtime Rustaceans, it was a reminder of how an ambitious side project helped push OS design forward. For newcomers, it was an invitation to see Rust not just as todayâs tool but as part of a longer story still unfolding.
âMemory Safety Everywhere with Rust and Carbonâ by Chandler Carruth had a different energy, more of a conversation about how languages fit within the broader ecosystem. He wasnât pitching Carbon as a Rust competitor but exploring how the two could complement each other. It came across less like a âlanguage showdownâ and more like a genuine exploration of how memory safety principles are spreading across programming.
The conference also highlighted Rustâs role in antiâhuman trafficking forensics, porting TrieMaps from C inside Redis, embedded Rust in EVs at Rivian, shipping Rust libraries to Python/TypeScript/Ruby, and building secure messaging for The Guardianâs whistleblowers. Rust isnât just cool, itâs powering real-world impact.
This yearâs RustConf truly felt like no other.
Catch you next year for RustConf 2026!
RUST Q&A INTERVIEW đŚ
Q: What excites you most about Rustâs future in the next 5 years?
A: âMost importantly Iâm excited about the wider adoption of rust by multiple industries. Not only automotive, ai, Defence but also all sorts of c++ heavy fields. Hoping for the game industry to make a move eg with bevy or other engines. As well as seeing more backend and api heavy companies realizing the potential and also important to me, seeing the green value since rust is way more energy friendly and Ressource efficient that Java and Js based backend servers. My hope is that most of it will Happen within the next 5 years.â
Q: Whatâs one feature youâd love to see added to Rust soon?
A: âThat is probably a cargo feature, but it is really exciting. It is about a per user compiled artefacts cache.
With the promise of reduced build times and less space in the device being wasted with duplications.
It might remains a longer road but IMO absolutely worth it.â
Q: How has Rust impacted you, and your work?
A: âI fell in love with Rust a few years ago, short past the 1.0 release and since then I worked my way up from doing Rust as hobby, then open source, then professionally. Iâm now maintaining a handful open source crates and no other language gave me this much joy and confidence in doing so.
I started doing Rust because I was tired of using other languages with ecosystems and tooling that just caused to much frustration on my professional work life. Simple things like installing and updating the toolchain or managing dependencies were a pain back then in almost all languages. Rust took a refreshing holistic approach on solving those problems in the best possible way.
Iâm also looking forward to explore more and more new problem spaces arriving in the rust ecosphere and getting solved in a fresh and new way. Those are all great learning opportunities.
At work a lot of people have already realized the potential and the opportunity that Rust brings to the table. Yet evangelizing and spreading the word remains an important thing to do. This is why the Rust Munich meetup (organized by Ludwig and myself) and the Rust meetup at work (organized by my fellow colleagues in Walldorf Philipp and Nico) are very important forums to nurture a vibrant community.â
About the Respondent: Sven Kanoldt is a rustlang enthusiast, co-organizer at @rust-meetup-munich, maintainer of @cargo-generate, creator of t-rec-rs and @steganogram.
Connect with Sven: X, Blog, GitHub.
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT đĄ
Cross
Cross-compiling Rust code is usually a pain: endless toolchains, mismatched libraries, and that one arcane Docker command you always forget.
Cross gives you âzero setupâ cross compilation and testing for your Rust crates. Translation: you can actually ship code to weird architectures without wanting to throw your laptop out the window.
So whatâs the problem it solves? Building and testing Rust crates.
Hereâs what makes cross worth bookmarking:
Cargo, but everywhere - Same CLI you already know just add cross in front and youâre good.
Cross testing - Run your unit tests on exotic architectures (yes, even MIPS).
All the channels - Stable, beta, nightly - take your pick, cross doesnât judge.
Config options to tweak behavior with Cargo.toml, Cross.toml, or plain old env vars.
If youâve ever cursed at toolchains, cross is basically Rustâs gift basket of sanity.
Check out cross on GitHub at https://github.com/cross-rs/cross.
AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK đ
The Rust compiler performance working group announced faster linking times with 1.90.0 stable on Linux using the LLD linker and Rust Foundation team Launches Rust Innovation Lab with Rustls as Inaugural Project. Lori Lorusso wrote Crossing the streams: Project + Foundation discussing his role of bridging the Rust Project and Rust Foundation by fostering collaboration, and promoting Rust's adoption through community engagement and content creation.
Jakub BerĂĄnek wrote âAdding #[derive(From)] to Rustâ where he recounts how an annoying problem he faced led to his first RFC being accepted, and eventually him implementing it in Rust.
The talented team at SeaQL wrote âThe road to SeaQuery 1.0â chronicling their journey and updates leading to the release of SeaQuery 1.0.
Nicholas Nethercoteâs Faster Rust builds on Mac explains a hidden performance issue on macOS that slows down Rust builds, tests, and even other compiled languages, and how to fix it.
Jon from Ubuntu (the VP of Engineering himself) decided to reply to comments about Ubuntuâs adoption of sudo-rs, because whatâs more fun than fighting developers about sudo? [video]
David Lattimore wrote about Wild performance tricks highliting his RustForge 2025 talk about advanced performance optimizations used in the Wild linker.
Spinel Cooperative released rv, a Ruby version manager inspired by uv, because apparently Rust isnât content with building its own tools, itâs now mentoring everyone elseâs toolchains too!
In Elephants for Breakfast, John Arundel tackles the problem of testing non-deterministic Rust code. He shows how to break down a flaky function into smaller testable parts.
Alfonso Subiotto from Polar Signal gave a talk on DST (again) With State Machines in Rust. [video]
Rain Paharia wrote âDealing with cancel safety in async Rustâ detailing the mechanics of async cancellation, common sources of cancellation issues, and strategies for writing and consuming cancel-safe code to ensure system correctness.
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Had a busy week last week and met some amazing people which felt great. Take care and make friends.
That's all for now, Rustaceans.
John & Elley.