RustConf 2026 - Montreal

My first time attending RustConf, and I am absolutely blown away by the quality of the event and the content presented at the event. Depending on how you look at it, RustConf 2026 was a five-day event. On the first day, I spent the day with the Safety Critical Rust Consortium (SCRC). Then there was a day of workshops, followed by the 2 core conference days, and, to top things off, on the last day, there is a community-content-led Unconference.

Safety Critical In Rust

The SCRC is a group of individuals and organizations working together to advance the use of Rust in functional safety projects. AdaCore has its roots in functional safety systems; it is what we have been doing for 30+ years, and we are keen to collaborate with peers in the ecosystem to advance the application of Rust in high-integrity systems. The consortium is led by Pete LeVasseur (from Woven by Toyota), who does an excellent job of bringing people together and making them feel welcome and productive. We covered a range of topics, including a presentation on Rust-based software projects certified for functional safety, such as the SonAir ADAR One.

One of the topics that AdaCore is contributing to, which will be key to functional safety certification, is improving code coverage in Rust. We will describe that work in a blog post soon as well.

The Conference

The two days of the conference were packed with presentations on everything from Rust use cases, including one from Volvo on their SmartCell battery concept, which I had never heard of before, and sounds like it could change how batteries are used in EVs. This was my favorite presentation of the conference. There were other presentations on open source organization, on crates, on language concepts, too much to mention.

The UnConference

While the conference is a platform for people to present their work, the unconference is a place for the community to share ideas and collaborate. There were a handful of breakout rooms, each covering a different topic. Each topic was discussed for about an hour, then the team moved on. People were bouncing between rooms to align with topics that connect best with them.

The Member Summit

Almost missed this as it was at the same time as the unconference. I was able to catch the end of this event, hang out with other Rust Foundation member companies, and talk about topics such as funding, sustainability, and AI.

Take Aways

The conference was a tremendous learning experience for me. I also realized that I need to spend more time with my fingers on the keyboard. The people and the conference were fantastic, and being present in person certainly gave me a better understanding of the force behind the Rust movement. Memory safety is here to stay; it is good for the industry to have multiple languages available to provide memory safety, specifically for embedded systems.

What I would like to see for future Rust conferences is more embedded systems content. There were some presentations on robotics, medicine, and automotive, but you can never have too much embedded content!

The recordings should be available soon via YouTube. I’ll be working with the team at AdaCore to prepare our submissions for RustWeek in Utrecht in 2027 and RustConf 2027 in beautiful Vancouver, BC.