When uom isn't enough: Handling units of measurement in production CAD
RustNLWhen uom isn't enough: Handling units of measurement in production CAD by Rose Peck. As it turns out, handling units of measurement in the real world is actually really hard! uom is an awesome library that provides strong, static types to represent different measurement units. It's tempting to just slap uom types on everything and call it a day, but when making production CAD software, this isn't enough. Today we'll be talking about all of the surprising challenges with real world unit handling, and investigating some solutions and their tradeoffs. You can find a follow-up blog post by rose here: https://sixfold-origami.com/articles/unit-handling-addenda About Rose Peck (she/they): Extremely average programmer, vacillating between “it’s so over” and “we’re so back”. I write Rust for a living at the Foresight Spatial Labs, making CAD software with the Bevy engine. I love writing, making games, and folding origami! I’m also a grandmaster Tetris player. - git: https://github.com/sixfold-origami/ - website: https://sixfold-origami.com/ This talk was given at RustWeek 2026 as part of the Main track on Tuesday 19 May. You can find a playlist of all talks in this track at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8Q1w7Ff68DCvQXADosMcF0aMvLhGXU4S, and a playlist of all RustWeek 2026 talks at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8Q1w7Ff68DBpmF38rcIAf8Z9Gj2TnlgM For information about RustWeek 2027, go to https://2027.rustweek.org. We hope to see you there!