The Language of Empathy

The Language of Empathy by Taylor Cramer. Late one night in January 2016, having spent hours in a university lab debugging seemingly intractable C++ bugs, I made the jump to Rust– a language that recognized my struggle. This empathy for the plight of systems programmers made Rust unique then, and it’s what makes the language invaluable now. Empathy is a core design philosophy, a technical constraint, and a primary reason why people love writing Rust. This talk explores the tangible impact empathy has had on our code, tooling, and community. We will break down how this design ethos actively shapes our software and explore practical tools for building more empathetic relationships and more robust systems. About Taylor Cramer (she/her): Taylor Cramer currently works on Rust/C++ interoperability at Google. She's a former member of Rust's language design and compiler teams, and got her start contributing to Rust back in 2016. Taylor is passionate about welcoming new members into the Rust community and sharing that you, too, can build cool things that help other people. - git: https://github.com/cramertj/ - linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cramertj/ 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!

Interop is the New Rewrite: Design Axioms for Rust's Next Frontier

• FFI & interop

Interop is the New Rewrite: Design Axioms for Rust's Next Frontier by Tyler Mandry. Demand for Rust has grown rapidly, making it a standard choice for new projects that need reliable and efficient software. But in many of the world's largest and most active codebases, the language barrier still makes adoption extremely difficult or impossible. This presents the Rust Project with a huge opportunity and a difficult question: Can we build seamless cross-language interop without ruining Rust? To make the most of the momentum Rust has today, we need design efforts that span the language, libraries, and tooling. Rust maintainers need to understand the dynamics leading to its present success and future growth. And Rust users need to understand how the next phase of Rust adoption impacts them. We will answer: - How does interop benefit the language for existing Rust users? - How do we introduce expressive interop without making Rust a union of all languages? - How do we establish soundness in mixed Rust/C++ codebases? - How should Rust Project teams govern and evaluate a wave of interop-motivated requests? This is a roadmap for how we scale Rust's adoption without compromising our core values. About Tyler Mandry (he/him): Tyler co-leads the Rust Language Design team and works on Rust at Google, most recently focusing on language interop and async. - git: http://github.com/tmandry - bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/tylermandry.bsky.social - website: https://tmandry.gitlab.io/blog/ This talk was given at RustWeek 2026 as part of the Rust Project track on Wednesday 20 May. You can find a playlist of all talks in this track at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8Q1w7Ff68DBkk0ddSEqdf97swuDvMSKS, 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!

Life of an async fn

• Async

async/await is one of the headline features to ship in Rust this year. But how does it actually work, and what does that mean for performance? We’ll walk through what happens to async/await code inside the compiler. We’ll see some of the performance implications that result from this, and how to avoid common pitfalls. You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of how your async/await code behaves at runtime and what the compiler is doing under the hood. Finally, we’ll explore some of the cutting-edge use cases for async/await and coroutines beyond web servers.