As I have for many years, I was happy to attend RustConf 2024 last September in
Montreal, Canada. This conference is always a great opportunity to meet and
hear from other Rust Project members as well as the larger Rust community. This
is the first time it has been hosted outside of the United States, and directly
operated by the Rust Foundation, and I think it went well with over 600
in-person attendees and many more virtual. The St-James Theatre was also a
beautiful venue!
Wednesday's opening keynote was by Aeva Black of CISA about securing open
source, and their recommendations toward memory-safe languages are certainly
friendly to a Rust audience. Other interesting talks include Jack Wrenn's
"Safety Goggles" for mem::transmute, Sparrow Li's overview of compiler
performance, and Martin Pool's cargo-mutants tool for mutation testing. I also
chatted with Martin a bit afterward about possibilities for mutating unsafe
code. The closing keynote gave an overview of the Rust Project from Jack Huey
and James Munns, which should certainly help anyone looking to get involved.
The next day's opening keynote was from Miguel Ojeda about Rust for Linux --
that is in the kernel itself. We are already starting to use this in Fedora,
and it will only increase as we see new development like the Nova driver. I
also attended Predrag Gruevski's talk on semver-checks for API development, and
Joshua Liebow-Feeser's design for "Safety in an Unsafe World" on API
encapsulation. The last keynote was from Nicholas Matsakis on Project Goals,
which is an effort I applaud and hope to see continue, and I do know that
2025H1 planning is now underway.
Finally, Friday's session was an unconference, in the style of ad-hoc talk
proposals and round table discussions. We had good conversations about Rust's
Leadership Council, which is still relatively young, as well as cross-team
communication and possibly unifying some common processes. On a lighter note,
an "ambitious wild ideas vibe check" was a great rapid-fire of ideas from
around the room, and in many cases the "vibe" was "sure, let's do it!" Many
times, the biggest blocker is just getting someone to do the work.
This trip report is a short format, but if you are interested in any of the
RustConf 2024 talks, they are now available on the Rust Foundation's YouTube
channel in this playlist. I know I have a few that I need to go back to,
especially those I missed from separate tracks. Next year's RustConf has also
been set for September 2-5, so I hope to see folks there!
