Common Pitfalls of Rewriting Things In Rust

Common Pitfalls of Rewriting Things In Rust by Cliff L. Biffle. While a lot of systems code can be expressed easily in Rust, there are common patterns from C, C++, and Go that are just more effort to copy than they're worth. I'll go through some common cases, examine what properties of Rust make them harder to use, and evaluate alternative strategies that play more to the language's strengths. Expect appearances from: cycles in callback pointers; intrusive linked lists; virtual class hierarchies; and more About Cliff L. Biffle (he/him): Cliff likes code that is clear, maintainable, and very fast, and tools that let him achieve this. He's been bludgeoning problems with Rust since 2015, with a particular focus on the bare-metal firmware, hardware simulation, and operating systems layers. He's currently a firmware engineer at Oxide Computer, where he developed the Hubris operating system kernel. 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!