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Rust All Hands 2026 Retrospective
- fishfasell 2mo agoRust is such an incredible language. I really hope it becomes more widely adopted in the future.
- kolanos 2mo agoAgree. I've been delving deep into Rust for some personal projects, and while there are some sharp edges (that likely won't go away) the tooling, ecosystem and general ergonomics more than make up for it. Hoping I'm not in the minority of relative newcomers and that the language continues to thrive.
- Animats 2mo agoDelve alert!
- apitman 2mo agoI could see Rust becoming the language for coding agents, because it has such solid guardrails built in. I could also see it slipping into obscurity as LLMs get faster and compile times become a more and more obvious bottleneck on iteration speeds.
- Aurornis 2mo ago> I could also see it slipping into obscurity as LLMs get faster and compile times become a more and more obvious bottleneck on iteration speeds. I’ve worked on some very large Rust projects. The incremental compile times are nowhere near the same order of magnitude of a bottleneck as an LLM turn.
- apitman 2mo agoI don't doubt this is true for many projects currently (though it's not for a bevy project I'm working on). Have you tried Cerebras, Groq, Taalas, et al? It was a paradigm shift for me.
- Aurornis 2mo agoI have, but even with the high token generation speed, incremental Rust compile times were not a bottleneck. I was disagreeing with the concept that incremental compile times could be a bottleneck. LLMs are even better at doing large swaths of work at once and having it compile first or second try than a human.
- apitman 2mo agoOh are you saying the human remains the bottleneck?
- nullsanity 2mo ago[dead]
- rr808 2mo agoHow long does a compile take? Because this was the biggest issue for me. I dont really like Python but the ability to make some changes then run it instantly is wild for me.
- woodruffw 2mo agoYou probably already know this, but I figure it bears repeating: most people should be running `cargo check` during development, not `cargo build`. The latter is only necessary when you actually need the built binary; the former is sufficient for type- and borrow-checking. (On my local machine, `cargo check` is roughly 2x faster than `cargo build`. It's still slower than hot-reloaded Python, but it's rarely my development bottleneck.)
- pjmlp 2mo agoA non starter for anything related to graphics or UI development, which is kind of most Rust stuff are CLIs or TUIs, like being back on curses heyday, Turbo Vision and Clipper.
- Klonoar 2mo agoVarious Rust UI projects have been working towards hot-reloadable capabilities, based on the work from the Dioxus team. IME it's just not really that big of a deal at this point. YMMV, etc.
- pjmlp 2mo agoI am aware, still far away from what something like C++ Builder was already offering in the 1990's, let alone other more modern alternatives.
- woodruffw 2mo agoIs it? An immense amount of the world’s graphical software is written for native graphical targets like SwiftUI, where the iteration cycle is similarly bound to build times. It’s certainly painful, but I don’t think it’s a non-starter.
- insanitybit 2mo agoI use LLMs and rust and compile times are absolutely a significant area of degradation. I love rust, I think it's the best language for LLMs, but the biggest win Rust could get for agentic development is to speed up the compiler.
- embedding-shape 2mo agoNeither of you talk about what sort of machine you're sitting on. Back when I used a netbook, I'd agree with you, for developing quick off programs, the compile times are horrible. But as someone on a workstation now, compilation times are the least of my problems, and disk space is more of a concern for me. You also don't share what LLM you use, some of them reason a lot, some of them nothing, some a bit. Again, personally I use LLMs with their maximum reasoning always, trading quality for speed/waiting every single time, and even compiling the Linux kernel would be faster than most LLM responses I get nowadays, for me, on a workstation.
- insanitybit 2mo agoI'm on an M4 Macbook. I use Codex, gpt, and Claude in various configurations, including Fable, xhigh, medium, high, ultracode, etc.
- dnautics 2mo ago> I think it's the best language for LLMs because of the type system? i work in ~dynamically typed language and the llms almost never make a type error.
- insanitybit 2mo agoThe type system is great and gives extremely fast feedback. The performance wins are also incredible, it just feels like you're throwing 100s of megabytes of RAM away and 10x latency when you don't choose rust now, and for little reason. The testing tooling is really solid - property testing, fuzzing, mutation testing, etc, is all easy to use. Code structure with nice abstractions that don't become spaghetti is nice (traits, enums, etc). Static binaries as a production artifact is really nice. Supply chain story is pretty solid with cargo-vet. It's hard to come up with anything where I think Rust isn't "best in class" other than compile times.
- ReactiveJelly 2mo agoJust run Rust compiles in the cloud. Really, if you're using a SaaSS LLM like Claude or Copilot or ChatGPT, which already sends all your code to someone else's computer to run on a beefy GPU, they should just send the Rust code to the same datacenter and send you back a binary. Little shocked that Anthropic isn't offering this. Rust compile speeds will matter less and less as hardware gets faster.
- dabinat 2mo agoCompile times are being worked on: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2026/roadmap-fast-builds.html https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2026/roadmap-...
- yencabulator 2mo ago> compile times Try https://github.com/kunobi-ninja/kache https://github.com/kunobi-ninja/kache
- the__alchemist 2mo agoDevil's advocate from the description at the top of relevant groups speaking. The two in areas I'm familiar with are areas I'm excited about seeing rust take off in the future, and are already a great use of it. I don't think those groups are the ones that will (or should) do it. Rust-GPU: This is the org responsible for Rust CUDA, which was a historically non-working library I spent too much time trying to get working. Instead, Cudarc is a simple, "just-works" library with a responsive maintainer. For grpahics, WGPU and Vulkan bindings are good paths. To watch: Nvidia's official Cuda-Oxide, which uses Cudarc's style API for Host, and its own native Rust kernels. (Early/WIP stage on that). It is surprising to see "Rust GPU" there instead of WGPU, Nvidia/Cuda-Oxide, or Cudarc there, as it's the least viable of the set. Embedded is a fantastic area for Rust to excel in, and it's already excellent thanks to the general language tooling, Cargo, and the Knurling tools Probe-RS and defmt. I'm not sold on the embedded working group's history and style. E.g. Embedded HAL is a poor fit for practical firmware and integrations. ESP on Rust was great but turned into a mess 1 - 1.5 years ago due to mismanagement, and letting a new maintainer rewrite large chunks of the HAL. I'm comfortable using Rust on STM32 and nRF, and have built working aerobatic quadcopter firmware in Rust, but have never seen eye-to-eye with the working group. In general, they trend towards complicated APIs which focus on Traits, safe abstractions, Async etc. My pref: Use Rust as a nice overall language, and write low-friction APIs, vs the abstractions. I disconnected from the Embedded rust OSS scene; It's still my top choice for new hardware, and use it at work. It seemed like no one wanted to talk about projects and building things with rust; instead it was about using ownership, generics, safety, Async models etc to make clunky APIs.
- LegNeato 2mo agoMaintainer of rust-gpu and rust-cuda here. 1. Rust CUDA is over 5 years years old, was dead for 2(?) years, but was rebooted and works. It enables both rust on the GPU and controlling the GPU from the host. The host library (cust) predates cudarc. If it was started today it would just use cudarc for the host side (and indeed, you can use the device side with cudarc). Rust-cuda is based on nvvm, which was the supported layer in the past but Nvidia is moving away from. 2. Rust-gpu (vulkan) works but isn't 100% complete of course. The dimforge folks are using, there are some crypto folks using, and we have llms written in it. Rust-gpu is only the "running rust on GPU part", the host is left to wgpu or ash or whatever. The Nvidia projects are great (we gave pre-release feedback on them), but they were not announced when the call for presentations went out. They were also released as experimental with only 2 people working on them so Nvidia was cautious about marketing and over-committing. We are the only people trying to bring rust natively to the GPU rather than just making the GPU work with rust (which others like cubecl, wgpu, cuda-oxide handle well). This has some interesting considerations from a rust language and compiler standpoint, which is what was talked about at the conf. We sponsored an unconf room and got as many folks from all the various GPU projects together, including nvidia. The big problems right now are a) everybody has different needs, b) there are very few people working in the space c) the entire rust project is generally indifferent to GPUs. I expect this to change in the next year or two.
- marsven_422 2mo ago[dead]
- 7e 2mo agoThe multithreaded front end crashes left and right with different features. No testing done. Won’t accept AI PRs so it will stay broken outside of my personal tree forever.
- Animats 2mo ago"The moderation panel provided a safe space for Rust moderators to discuss the challenges they face, with support from Q (head moderator of Hachyderm). The Project culture discussion examined sources of disempowerment for maintainers and contributors, and ways to address them. The sessions on Project Goals, north stars, and funding looked at improving how the Project coordinates and communicates work." Anonymous moderators? That's scary.
- panstromek 2mo agoRust moderators are not anonymous.
- lr1970 2mo agoCovid policy at Rust All-Hands [0] > On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, at the All-Hands and Unconf, we expect all attendees to test themselves in the morning. I thought Covid is long gone. What did I miss? [0] https://2026.rustweek.org/covid-policy-all-hands-and-unconf/ https://2026.rustweek.org/covid-policy-all-hands-and-unconf/
- throawayonthe 2mo agolong gone in the sense of media coverage perhaps? the virus hasn't gone anywhere and it's not like we have vaccines that give permanent/longterm immunity
- lr1970 2mo agoNowadays I am more concerned about measles and ebola viruses. Over-indexing on covid makes little sense in 2026.
- crote 2mo agoMeasles has a vaccine, ebola isn't found in the wild in the West. The chances of catching either from a random person at a meetup are basically zero. It is no longer a pandemic which is killing tens of thousands of people, but covid is very much still around, and there's no true long-term vaccine for it. A lot of people with it are going to be more-or-less asymptomatic. However, for a small bunch of immunocompromised people it is still very much life-altering or even deadly. For them catching it is just Not An Option, so if you want them at a large-scale meetup like this you'll have to ask all attendants to make the offer of spending a few seconds taking the $2 test.