Rust All Hands 2026: 166 Rustaceans gather in Utrecht
(Rust) All-Hands 2026 Retrospective
The Rust All Hands 2026 brought 166 Rust project members and guests to Utrecht for three days of collaboration. Sessions covered governance, language evolution, and interoperability, including topics like const generics, field projections, and Rust/C++ interop. The event also hosted the RustWeek Unconference with six ecosystem groups. Feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with an average rating of 9.5/10. The next All Hands is scheduled for May 27–29, 2027, in Utrecht.
I'm thrilled that we settled union operational semantics at the All Hands.
- the__alchemist
Devil'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 fo […]
- apitman
I 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.
- 7e
The 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.
- fishfasell
Rust is such an incredible language. I really hope it becomes more widely adopted in the future.
- Animats
"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.