alt.hn

8/2/2026 at 10:33:26 AM

Rust All Hands 2026 Retrospective

 https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/07/31/all-hands-2026-retrospective/

by dcminter

8/2/2026 at 3:08:30 PM

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 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.

by the__alchemist

8/2/2026 at 3:41:58 PM

Maintainer 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.

by LegNeato

8/2/2026 at 3:54:59 PM

That is great context and promising for the ecosystem as a whole. I owe it to myself and you to try it again. I think I will take an existing code base (I have a molecular dynamics engine in rust) that uses CUDARC, and I will write similar Cuda Oxide and Rust-Cuda implementations to compare. Would love to see what each does well. (Bearing in mind Cuda Oxide in particular may change its API heavily; IIRC I had an issue installing it in the past which blocked me, but I don't recall what specifically)

There is also a Cuda-Tile rust lib which I have been meaning to try, but I haven't used tiles so far.

by the__alchemist

8/2/2026 at 4:19:41 PM

Quite honestly I would use cuda-oxide over rust-cuda for anything new right now....while rust-cuda is more complete, cuda-oxide is more aligned with nvidia's future direction (when we were rebooting rust-cuda we were told to by nvidia to stay with the nvvm layer but their plans changed and it is clearly not where their focus is). It's of course just rust so you could just feature-gate off differences as 80% will probably be the same if you wanted to try both projects.

cuda-tile is great...I would use it for anything written from scratch as it is closer to how the hardware (and projects like triton) work. But there are tradeoffs as it requries your code to be structured a certain way.

by LegNeato

8/2/2026 at 8:10:27 PM

> ownership, generics, safety, Async

Aren’t they the main selling points of Rust? Why use Rust over another language if you’re not using its main features?

by dabinat

8/3/2026 at 11:38:22 PM

Yes, but actually no. In the embedded space the only other language worth considering is C/C++. The default is that everything is unsafe, so any Rust is already a massive improvement. Add to that the basic language UX and a lot of developers are waiting for an excuse to jump ship.

However, that does not mean that every single piece of code must be 100% safe. An embedded developer today is already constantly juggling with safety. Especially when it comes to low-level hardware interaction, I'd rather have a raw unsafe API today than wait several years for an inevitably-flawed safe abstraction.

I don't need Rust to track the ownership of an I2C peripheral. It's a nice-to-have, but it is easy enough to do by yourself - there aren't that many of them and interactions are rather obvious. I'm already used to the possibility of mishandling some pins resulting in the board catching fire, I promise I can handle this.

On the other hand, I really do want Rust to keep track of what's going on in all my business logic, for all the same reasons you want memory safety on a regular computer. Is my 10k-line protocol handler safe? Sure would love a double-check on that!

So no, I'm not really all that interested in the fancy clever abstractions. Making sure the KISS ones are rock solid is far more important to me.

by crote

8/2/2026 at 8:21:19 PM

Many would agree with you. For me, the main selling point is the overall pro/con balance of the language. It's just a nice language overall, especially when you place it only with other languages capable of running fast and low-level code.

I don't see rust and think "I have to write using Safe abstractions, traits etc because they're the rust way". There are many reasons to choose (or not depending on your preferences) rust beyond that. For example: "I am choosing rust here because Python's slow and its module system is a mess" or, "I'm choosing Rust here because its enum and struct syntax is fantastic" or "I'm choosing rust here because I can install the toolchain with a single command, and compile + flash with another without getting frustrated". Or "I'm choosing rust here because it makes it easy to architect complicated programs, and has really nice copmile-time error messages".

Stated another way: > Why use Rust over another language if you’re not using its main features?

It depends on the use case and what language you're comparing it to.

by the__alchemist

8/2/2026 at 5:33:22 PM

> 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.

Co-signed.

by MrBuddyCasino

8/2/2026 at 2:54:03 PM

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.

by apitman

8/2/2026 at 2:57:12 PM

> 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.

by Aurornis

8/2/2026 at 5:12:22 PM

I 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.

by insanitybit

8/2/2026 at 7:28:51 PM

Neither 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.

by embedding-shape

8/2/2026 at 10:22:42 PM

I'm on an M4 Macbook. I use Codex, gpt, and Claude in various configurations, including Fable, xhigh, medium, high, ultracode, etc.

by insanitybit

8/2/2026 at 11:03:01 PM

> 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.

by dnautics

8/2/2026 at 11:59:59 PM

The 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.

by insanitybit

8/3/2026 at 2:03:56 AM

i think rusts composition is problematic. you can have two abstractions that if you mix them the outcomes are not what you expect unless you have a deep understanding of the details, (e.g. clone/iter) and rust is all about hiding details from you.

by dnautics

8/3/2026 at 2:06:14 AM

I really couldn't disagree more. Rust doesn't hide those details at all. APIs tend to be extremely explicit. I have never run into the issue you're describing in rust, I have run into it far more in other languages where mutability and sharing are implicit.

by insanitybit

8/3/2026 at 2:08:16 AM

the existence of iter is to hide implementation detsils from you.

by dnautics

8/3/2026 at 12:16:14 PM

I don't understand what you mean at all. Iter is just a trait. There's nothing special about it.

by insanitybit

8/2/2026 at 3:28:35 PM

How 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.

by rr808

8/2/2026 at 3:40:21 PM

You 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.)

by woodruffw

8/2/2026 at 6:20:00 PM

cargo check is useful to verify the code compiles (it's extremely rare to have compilation errors that survive cargo check). But cargo build is required if you want to actually try out the code you wrote, e.g. in order to run a test that you or the LLM wrote.

by est31

8/2/2026 at 7:10:52 PM

Yeah but like, tests encode behavior… sometimes I go all day without running a test. Sometimes multiple days. I’ve been using unit tests less and debug asserts more and more now days anyways. Encoding behavior as close the relevant code as possible. And using types and type state to minimize invariants. Idk, but it seems like such a smell when my coding agent drops 10 unit tests for a 300 LoC module. It means it did a bad job of writing the code in the first place.

Anyways, if the code compiles, but the behavior is wrong, a test might be useful. But so is reading the code… so I’m skeptical of rerunning tests constantly.

by J_Shelby_J

8/2/2026 at 6:41:07 PM

Yeah, I mean more for the iteration half -- YMMV, but I find that I make the LLMs most productive when I have them design the typestates first, ensure they compile, and then work on tests after that (rather than stacking tests through the process).

by woodruffw

8/2/2026 at 4:19:19 PM

A 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.

by pjmlp

8/2/2026 at 4:43:34 PM

Is 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.

by woodruffw

8/2/2026 at 7:06:59 PM

SwiftUI has an incremental compiler with interactive workflows.

by pjmlp

8/2/2026 at 7:54:21 PM

Rust has an incremental compiler. And TMU SwiftUI’s live preview is essentially a very rough approximation of what the actual build would produce; it’s not a suitable replacement for a real build when developing a non-trivial UI.

by woodruffw

8/2/2026 at 8:06:14 PM

The experiences still fails short of XCode or Playground, hence why Slint has its own scripting language.

by pjmlp

8/2/2026 at 8:21:21 PM

Sure, I don't disagree. It's just not clear to me that developers actually index that heavily on hot reloading to begin with.

by woodruffw

8/3/2026 at 5:17:44 AM

Devs doing graphics and game development care so much, that there are companies like Live++ selling hot reloading tools for C++.

Like, devs actually pay for having hot reloading.

by pjmlp

8/2/2026 at 4:38:11 PM

Various 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.

by Klonoar

8/2/2026 at 7:08:12 PM

I am aware, still far away from what something like C++ Builder was already offering in the 1990's, let alone other more modern alternatives.

by pjmlp

8/2/2026 at 6:43:42 PM

My rust compiles in the time it takes to switch from my editor to my browser to see the changes incremental recompiles are fast enough imo. Dioxus has hot reloading if you want to go faster and Bevy uses it for hot reloading as well.

by slopinthebag

8/2/2026 at 7:09:00 PM

With a beefy desktop, or some Apple wonder CPU, right?

by pjmlp

8/2/2026 at 10:29:03 PM

M2 air. Pay to play brotha

by slopinthebag

8/3/2026 at 5:15:57 AM

Which is why devs on other world regions will chose something else, more ammendanble to their pockets to stay productive.

by pjmlp

8/3/2026 at 7:36:03 AM

Ok and?

by slopinthebag

8/3/2026 at 9:43:26 AM

And less language adoption in regions whose devs aren't able to afford beefy computers to use Rust ergonomically.

Which is why then they go back other languages,

https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev

by pjmlp

8/3/2026 at 9:59:43 AM

Gamedevs usually have the most powerful machines of all types of devs because of it's very nature. Yes you can't compile Rust on the GPU but big gpu's come with big CPUs usually.

by slopinthebag

8/2/2026 at 7:29:59 PM

> I dont really like Python but the ability to make some changes then run it instantly is wild for me.

You'll love Clojure, gets you even closer; you can make changes while your program is running, by changing source code then applying just that function you changed, while your editor is connected to your program and can show what the new results are.

by embedding-shape

8/2/2026 at 8:15:09 PM

I'm quite often working in a Jupyter notebook where the imported modules are reloaded. I can have x in memory, change method y of X and then call x.y() and get the new definition.

It feels almost criminal that it works, but it's quite nice.

by 7734128

8/2/2026 at 5:11:46 PM

Initial compilation and incremental compilation are very different.

Large Rust projects are broken up into modules. If you change one module you don’t have recompile the whole project.

Remember we’re talking about compensation time versus LLM turns in this thread. Even a 10 second incremental compile is orders of magnitude faster than an LLM turn.

by Aurornis

8/2/2026 at 5:27:48 PM

> Remember we’re talking about compensation time versus LLM turns in this thread. Even a 10 second incremental compile is orders of magnitude faster than an LLM turn.

This entirely depends on (a) what a step/prompt/turn is trying to do and (b) tooling and rate limiting and various other aspects of your model and/or access to it.

If you have high rate limits and aren't using an Opus-or-larger sized model you can get a LOT of changes done in 10 seconds.

And this is especially true for "oh not all the tests are passing yet, let me change..." iterations where the change attempts are often low-single-digit seconds.

by majormajor

8/2/2026 at 2:59:49 PM

I 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.

by apitman

8/2/2026 at 3:07:26 PM

I 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.

by Aurornis

8/2/2026 at 3:11:10 PM

Oh are you saying the human remains the bottleneck?

by apitman

8/2/2026 at 3:28:32 PM

[dead]

by nullsanity

8/2/2026 at 5:30:15 PM

Just 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.

by ReactiveJelly

8/3/2026 at 10:59:18 AM

Covid 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/

by lr1970

8/3/2026 at 11:13:33 AM

long 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

by throawayonthe

8/3/2026 at 7:04:44 PM

Nowadays I am more concerned about measles and ebola viruses. Over-indexing on covid makes little sense in 2026.

by lr1970

8/2/2026 at 5:43:37 PM

"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.

by Animats

8/2/2026 at 5:54:33 PM

Rust moderators are not anonymous.

by panstromek

8/2/2026 at 2:23:18 PM

Rust is such an incredible language. I really hope it becomes more widely adopted in the future.

by fishfasell

8/2/2026 at 5:23:57 PM

Agree. 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.

by kolanos

8/2/2026 at 5:41:48 PM

Delve alert!

by Animats

8/2/2026 at 4:34:55 PM

[dead]

by marsven_422

8/2/2026 at 4:55:55 PM

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.

by 7e