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