(Rust) All-Hands 2026 Retrospective

5 hours ago

The Rust All Hands 2026 in Utrecht gathered 166 Rustaceans for in-person collaboration, discussing the language's future and resolving blockers.
The event included 73 sessions over 3 days, covering governance, Rust evolution, interoperability, and compiler internals.
Interop discussions focused on Rust/C++ and Rust/Linux/CPython integration, with notable progress on Crubit and LLVM IR.
Feedback was highly positive (9.5/10 average), with attendees praising hallway conversations, workshops, and collaborative progress.
The next All Hands is scheduled for May 27–29, 2027, in Utrecht, as part of RustWeek.

The author attended NixCon 2025 in Rapperswil, Switzerland, at OST University of Applied Sciences.
Friday included talks on Nix-based CI (cloud.devenv.sh), Hydra queue runner rewrite in Rust, Nix dev shells, and adoption stories from Shopify and ASML.
Lightning talks on Friday covered Determinate Nix features, NixOS for friends/family, and systemd-sysupdate for A/B updates.

A developer spent four months working on 'intra-doc links' for rustdoc, allowing links to items by name.
The feature will become stable in Rust 1.48.0, which is four weeks away.
Manishearth and the developer co-authored a detailed blog post about intra-doc links on the official Rust blog.

MCH2022 was a large hacker camp event in the Netherlands, originally planned for 2021 but delayed due to COVID-19, with over 3500 attendees.
The event was a success thanks to many volunteers and teams, and nearly all talks are available online.
First talk: 'Hacking the genome' covered DNA basics, gene editing, its potential, and ethical considerations.

The author focuses on improving discoverability in Rust in 2021, addressing challenges in finding features across the compiler, libraries, devtools, and community.
In the compiler, enhancing error messages to guide users toward solutions (e.g., suggesting the Entry API for borrow checker issues) is a key goal.
For libraries, improving documentation to include error-solving examples (e.g., suggesting Entry API or derive macros) can help users learn and fix code.

Bun started as a Zig port of esbuild's JavaScript/TypeScript transpiler and grew into a large-scope project including a package manager, test runner, and Node.js APIs.
Stability issues like memory leaks and crashes in Zig led the team to rewrite Bun in Rust using Claude AI, completing the port in 11 days with extensive automated workflows and adversarial reviews.
The Rust rewrite fixed 128 bugs, reduced memory usage, decreased binary size by ~20%, improved performance by 2-5%, and enhanced maintainability with Rust's safety features.

The author attended NixCon 2025 in Rapperswil, Switzerland, at OST University of Applied Sciences.
Friday included talks on Nix-based CI (cloud.devenv.sh), Hydra queue runner rewrite in Rust, Nix dev shells, and adoption stories from Shopify and ASML.
Lightning talks on Friday covered Determinate Nix features, NixOS for friends/family, and systemd-sysupdate for A/B updates.

A developer spent four months working on 'intra-doc links' for rustdoc, allowing links to items by name.
The feature will become stable in Rust 1.48.0, which is four weeks away.
Manishearth and the developer co-authored a detailed blog post about intra-doc links on the official Rust blog.

MCH2022 was a large hacker camp event in the Netherlands, originally planned for 2021 but delayed due to COVID-19, with over 3500 attendees.
The event was a success thanks to many volunteers and teams, and nearly all talks are available online.
First talk: 'Hacking the genome' covered DNA basics, gene editing, its potential, and ethical considerations.

The author focuses on improving discoverability in Rust in 2021, addressing challenges in finding features across the compiler, libraries, devtools, and community.
In the compiler, enhancing error messages to guide users toward solutions (e.g., suggesting the Entry API for borrow checker issues) is a key goal.
For libraries, improving documentation to include error-solving examples (e.g., suggesting Entry API or derive macros) can help users learn and fix code.

Bun started as a Zig port of esbuild's JavaScript/TypeScript transpiler and grew into a large-scope project including a package manager, test runner, and Node.js APIs.
Stability issues like memory leaks and crashes in Zig led the team to rewrite Bun in Rust using Claude AI, completing the port in 11 days with extensive automated workflows and adversarial reviews.
The Rust rewrite fixed 128 bugs, reduced memory usage, decreased binary size by ~20%, improved performance by 2-5%, and enhanced maintainability with Rust's safety features.

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